Book Review: Changing Behavior: Immediately Transform Your Relationships with Easy-to-Learn, Proven Communication Skills

Title: Changing Behavior: Immediately Transform Your Relationships with Easy-to-Learn, Proven Communication Skills
Author: Georgianna Donadio

Content: 8.5/10
It offers a practical step-by-step guide, supported by research and proven strategies to enable readers to develop a much more meaningful and effective communication relationship with the people they desire to improve their current relationships with.

Readability: 8/10
The 12 steps of Pure Presence is written in an easy-to-understand manner so that readers can pick up and acquire the skills easily to improve the quality of their communication skills.

Overall Ranking 16.5/20
Overall, Changing Behavior is a good read that offers important and timely advice for people who desire to bring transformation to their relationships, health and happiness as whole.

Step 2: Be physically comfortable and relaxed – Adopt an upright and centred sitting posture to enable you and the other person to be relaxed and thereby assist you in remaining in pure presence throughout the communication.

Step 5: Listen with understanding – Initiate a conversation with a respectful inquiry with the other person and seek to listen attentively without disruption while the latter respond to your inquiry.

Step 8: Be patient with yourself and the other person –
It takes time for people to notice and accept that you do not have an agenda or you are not going to judged them or give advice or suggestions.

Step 12: Keep trying to perfect your skills – Even if you experience some frustrating moments and mind wander during a conversation, you can begin again with the next conversation. It is crucial to be committed t improve the quality of communication in your relationship.

In summary, Changing Behavior is a good read that offers important and timely advice for people who desire to bring transformation to their relationships, health and happiness as whole. It offers excellent tips, substantiated by research. It also asks questions to reflect the points back at you. If you are interested in finding out more, do check out the Amazon.com page for more reviews.

Better Interpersonal Communication

How Important Is Cultural Awareness In Business?

Cultural awareness is a hugely important aspect of business interaction. Failing to understand how these elements play out in a negotiation can very easily leave you on the back foot.

Effective negotiating is hard enough as it is. You have to understand and be able to effectively read and react to a range of body language, negotiating strategies and understand exactly how far you are prepared to go to achieve your objective. This is made all the harder when international factors are thrown into the mix. Body language, interpersonal behaviours and interpretation of language are all affected differently by different cultures and a number of business thinkers and academics have devoted their energies to identifying and attempting to explore these differences and how they can be understood for greater negotiation success.

Examples of differences in international business negotiations: To ask an Asian business person to make a yes or no decision during negotiation will be highly damaging. Their cultural norm is to avoid displeasing others with negative responses, and they will go to great lengths to avoid ‘losing face’ by admitting that they lack the ability to do something. This is shown particularly in the Thai culture where there isn’t a word meaning ‘no’ in the Thai language! In a similar way French business people will tend to say no outright when they are actually considering options and meaning ‘maybe’.

In other countries, the norm is to give people the answer that they want to hear when they ask a question – which can be highly confusing in business negotiations! This is commonplace in Japan, Mexico or Lebanon.

Maintaining eye contact is viewed as being important in America and those who don’t do it arouse suspicion for being shifty. However in other countries, an attempt to keep eye contact is viewed as being aggressive, and it’s particularly offensive in countries such as Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. However, if you’re negotiating in Saudi Arabia, make sure you do keep open and consistent eye contact, as it’s viewed as being highly important to facilitating communication. There are other more specific cultural differences too, which if not followed, can cause great offence. For example in Saudi Arabia once again, it’s considered to be insulting to ask after the health of the host’s spouse, pass items using the left hand or show the soles of your shoes.

Similarly in Korea, make sure you pass with both hands, and avoid discussing politics or anything related to Japan. Formal greetings and introductions are also very important here and use rank and title when addressing guests.

Relationships are highly valued in many cultures, particularly in Asian and European cultures where the longer-term benefits of a relationship are valued more highly than short term transactions and quick wins. This is often opposite to the views of American business people who value speed and will often negotiate aggressively to achieve short term objectives.

The important thing to note is that whilst it may not be practical to learn a foreign language to carry out a particular negotiation, it can be possible to rapidly learn enough about non-verbal communication for international parties to the procedure, thus avoiding potentially costly errors.

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Article by Linguarama:

Linguarama is the right partner for Business Language Training and Cross Cultural Training, whether for individual tuition or corporate language training.

Article Source: http://www.articlealley.com/http://mb011085.articlealley.com/how-important-is-cultural-awareness-in-business-1608596.html

Business Body Language

Body Language is one of the most important aspect in developing a personality. Every individual is been characterized by  his/her body language. Generally your body language is been justified by the first contact of the person to you. They generally by their first look notice how your aura is. They will judge your whole character by the way you behave infront of them. Generally before you speak, your body speaks a lot about you.

Posture

If we talk about our posture, we must keep in mind that the most important key people notice in us is how we carry ourself and present before them. We should keep few things in mind regarding our posture that is : When we stand we should keep our stomach in , chest out , shoulder’s back and head up. This few points helps us to show how confident we are.

Handshakes

If we talk about the Handshakes, we must have following points in mind :

1.   We should hold persons hand firmly.

2.  We must shake hands from web to web, maximum 4 times.

3.  We should maintain positive and constant eye contact with the person.

4.   We should have a light smile on our face, when we are on the way to handshake.

Eye Contact

If we talk about Eye Contact, generally a good eye contact shows a confidence on your part. It also helps you in understanding what the person saying verbally is correct or not. It is a perfect sign of showing that you are paying attention. Generally if we are good at eye contact our listening capability also increases. We are made to force to listen to a person to whom we are paying attention, which is a good way to present your body language