The 8 Important “I”s in Effective Communication | The first “I” …
I have more than 10 years experience in conducting trainings and team building sessions. I received this question from my trainer friends, my peers, my participants, my clients often :
“How can we conduct training effectively, how can we present effectively and how can we engage and connect to audience effectively?”
After years of finding out the answer, I have came out with this 8 Important “i”s of effective communication to guide myself every single time while I am preparing for any meeting, discussion, negotiation, presentation, training, sharing session and etc.
I am very excited to share this to you. I hope this can at least give you a sequential framework to assess your efficiency and quality of presentation and communication and able to identify where to improve and how to improve.
Every master was once a beginner.
And every pro began as an amateur.
So start now.
— Robin Sharma
I used to be an amateur in delivering and conducting training sessions and program too. But I am very blessed because I learned from very experienced master (which I called Sifu) at a very young age. While I was 23 years old, considered quite fresh in the job market.
During that time, I learned to overcome my own mental model of age-gap mentality and severe “imposter syndrome”. In the early days of my professional training career journey, I was constantly doubting myself. I asked questions : “who am I”, “what are my qualifications and credentials that people would want to listen and learn from what I teach, share or train”, “I am still so young… people already 40–50–60 years old, the participants have more life experiences that I do, how I gonna train and influence and impact? I have fear that I could not deliver the training well, I am afraid that people are not engaging or feel that it is valuable and etc. and the list just never ends….
How I am connecting that part of story to effective communication, because I realised I need a practical preparation method to prep myself before conducting the training program. Because it all starts with the first “I”. How I overcome this imposter syndrome or the mental blindspots that time bring it to the the first “i” of effective communication :
(of course, I will share with you what inspired me to develop this 8 “i”s of effective communication model in the later part of the story)
The First “I” :
INTENTION
Preparing my mentality — reinforcing myself the “why” am I doing “what” I am doing, the “intention” of why am I there to conduct trainings, why am I training what I am training to whom, who are these people, how I am going to help to improve lives of the community with the knowledge I shared and etc.
The “INTENTION” is my answer to overcome those self-doubts questions firmly every time before I conduct any training sessions. Same to you, who are reading this — if you are going to deliver a presentation, be clear with your intention of being there will set the stage and tone. This is an important mental exercise that you are going to do before you deliver.
Exercise#1 :
Why am I presenting or communicating this? What message do I want to send across? and why is this important to me and
why is this important to the audience?
During my early years as a community trainer, I was given the opportunity to train on subjects such as entrepreneurship and financial literacy. My target audiences are disadvantages community and marginalised groups who are physically challenged, lacking of education opportunity, living at the edge of poverty, coming from a rural area. They had to overcome lots of mental barriers in order to increase their household income to improve their living quality.
Besides just conducting training, I was given the opportunity to train new trainers that time. What inspired me to think of these 8"I”s — there was a night during one of the usual outstation training sessions, I was thinking how can I convey my message of the importance of delivering an impactful training to my trainers, how can I give them to “know-how” and the steps.
Every training is different because every time there are new participants in the room, our trainers’ mentality and mindset determined the quality and impact of the training to the people who are lacking of opportunities and don’t have the “know-how” to improve their life.
I was thinking how can I effectively convey this message to my trainer team on the importance and the know how of delivering impactful training sessions. Because of that reason, I have came out with this 8 “i”s after I reflected on my experience of delivering impactful trainings.
I realised I have been sharing this to my mentee and coachee while they are preparing for any sort of meetings and presentations, and it helped to guide them on how to do it step by step to create the desired outcome they want in any forms of their communication.
I am still learning every day, every time on how can I improve the way I tell story, the way I present, the way I conduct my trainings, the way I wanted to present my ideas in any sort of discussions, meetings and etc.
I am doing my MBA program currently. Despite the experience I had in training field, I am still learning to break the conventional barriers that how people think how a MBA student (or a certain role, position and etc) should present, should do the slides, should speak and etc.
Personally and professionally speaking, an effective communication to me : means the message was sent out from the sender is clear and able to be effectively received by the recipient.
Effective means the recipient of the message is inspired by that message and willingly and will act upon and accordingly to the sender’s message.
Communication comes in many different forms in our day to day life (be it presenting, conducting meeting, conducting trainings, organise team meeting, leading discussions) — Communication is the integral component in our day to day personal and professional life.
Being intentional in our communication required us to think and strategise in detailed, it could be in very creative and bold in term of how to present the ideas and thoughts across in different settings. In what format? Which channels? Through what mediums? What are the available tools to aid the communication?
Be creative to experiment different ways to help you to present or communicate your thoughts clearly by using storyboards, by drawing it out, it’s not always about the Canva slides, not about the PPT but to refine the process by thinking prioritising the objectives, outcomes and outputs of the communication.
Being intentional also mean you think about your audience intensely.
You wanted to relate to your audience. You want to create the resonance, you want the immediate connection and proximity from your audience to keep you going, you want that response so that you are achieving the objective and goal of the particular form of communications.
You really want to. This can’t be fake. People will feel it.
Intention brings you to practice on clarity. You will have the clarity while delivering the message. You will then sharpen your reflection and introspective skills throughout this process. The more you reflect, the more you will become aware, the more aware you are, the clearer you become when you are expressing and channeling the thoughts or ideas across.
Awareness is the mother of Clarity.
This will then lead you to the 2nd “I”s of effective communication → Intensity — you want people to take what you said seriously, that requires certain intensity though-out the process. Engaging and Connecting your audience required you to know how to create the energy throughout the process.
I hope you enjoy reading the first “I”, the intention of communication is the first key to be effective in our communication. Start today, ask yourself when you go into the next work meeting, what is your intention in that process?
Stay tune to my second “I” and following “I”s story and the know-how in each “I”.
Want to learn more about the remaining “i”s and the know-how and how to apply it immediately. You are welcome to email me at pennyleong.enrich@gmail.com
