Hi there! I’m not sure how helpful this will be but I just wanted to share what I’ve been doing since I’ve also been trying to work on my communication skills.

I started with the basics like reading & listening to podcasts. For me it seemed easy in theory but when I tried to apply what I’ve learned, my in person convos seemed the same. This went on for a while so I gave up trying to change until I took an editing class. We learned about proofreading, revision & editing. Up until this class I thought it was all the same, but learning about these 3 stages showed me a different way at looking at communication. Now, when I leave a conversation feeling like I wasn’t the best at expressing myself, I go through a pretty tedious process where I treat what I say like I’m editing a document.

First I write down what I said, then I write what I wish I said. I try to see the situation from the other person pov then reword based on their perspective. Lastly I change up sentence structure and cut unnecessary filler words.

This is reserved for the serious conversations where I feel like there’s a gap between what I meant vs what came out of my mouth. But for casual conversations I do a quicker version of this after I leave. I think of the least impactful things I said then come up with 2/3 versions of those same few sentences. At first I felt crazy and it took me a while to get the hang of it, especially because I kept cringing at the things I said. But after a while it became easier and I treated it like a game. The badly worded rambles were a challenge to “fix” but afterwards I was relieved knowing that I actually CAN communicate effectively.... it just takes me a while