Hello, and welcome to the first video in this series on the fundamentals of communicating and presenting.

The purpose of this series of videos is to define what world-class communicators do and why they do it so that you can learn and adopt these best practice approaches yourself. This will then enable you to be more successful in your business interactions, help you be more productive, improve your working relationships, save time, and become more influential.

Let's start by considering what we actually mean by effective communication. It's easy to think that being an effective communicator is all about speaking well or being articulate, and that's certainly part of it.

But really effective communication is about doing two things skillfully: being understood and also understanding others. When we do both well, we engage in mutually beneficial conversations that enable both parties to get what they need or to put it in the words of Stephen Covey from his hugely successful book, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," your mindset should be seek first to understand, then be understood. So how can we achieve this balance in a way that plays to our natural communicative instincts? Let's have a look at the effective communication cycle. This cycle, which defines what is required to communicate successfully, has four steps: inform, invite, listen, and clarify.

Let's go through each in turn and then address how you can use this cycle for maximum success. The inform step is about providing information, sharing your ideas and perspective.

The invite step is about asking open-ended questions to get the other person's perspective. The more open the question, the more you will learn. Questions such as: Tell me about this. Or: What are your thoughts? Or: How do you see this? The listening step is exactly that, listening, but listening is surprisingly challenging and counterintuitive. The skill is in committing to hear what is being said, not just waiting to talk.

The clarify step is your safety net. This is about reflecting back what you believe the other person has said and checking your understanding. Here we can use closed questions to confirm. Is that what you meant? Or: Did I understand you correctly? Even if you are told that you did indeed misunderstand something, you are still demonstrating your commitment to understand which builds rapport and makes anything you share afterwards more powerful as you have shown in that summary back to the person that your subsequent comments are based on a full and accurate understanding of their viewpoint. So that's the communication cycle.