Communication and soft skills development training course in Hong Kong

Learn to connect to, understand, help and influence people

Course objectives: This communication training programme develops your skills, mind sets and techniques to build better relationship with people, influence their thinking and behaviour effectively in social, work, family and romantic situations.

The lessons have the form of coaching and teaching to make them relevant for your needs. The classes are in English, one-to-one or you can come with your friends or colleagues.

In the training you can:

• develop your soft skills,
• improve your English (speaking, listening, grammar, pronunciation),
• practise for a job, promotional or school interview,
• prepare for an important workplace or business presentation,
• practise for a public speaking event or a speech,
• develop your story telling skills,
• develop your dating and relationship skills to find, attract and keep the right romantic partner,
• develop your persuasion, negotiation and leadership skills to increase your power and influence,
• prepare to host and entertain an important client who will visit HK
• prepare for an overseas business trip
• create and communicate ideas, work of art, solve problems, manage your business better.
• get some ideas and feedback how to communicate through media e.g. making audio and video presentation.

Communication topic modules

Communication is a huge topic so we broke it down into modules. Some of them are more speaking related while others are more on the relationship building, value creation or self-development side. Some are more theoretical while others focus on skill development. You can learn about, prepare for or practise:

• Presentation,
• Public speaking,
• Story telling,
• Negotiation,
• Leadership,
• Office politics,
• Marketing and selling,
• Interviewing (both as interviewee and interviewer),
• Dating (finding and attracting a romantic partner),
• Long-term male-female relationship building,
• Family, marriage, divorce and raising children,
• Creativity (creating products, services, solutions and ideas),
• Teaching, coaching, facilitating and mentoring,
• Habit changing, understanding and reducing addictions,
• Recognising and dealing with different personality types,
• Understanding and optimising the mind,
• Mind sets, beliefs, value and value perception, internal conflicts, multiple perspectives etc.
• Self-control, emotion and stress management,
• Managing and using our body to influence,
• Language mastery,
• Culture,
• Social constructs,
• Debate, argument and group discussion,
• Group dynamics.

Influence and impact

If you want to increase your power to influence people to help them or get what you want or you are fed up with others controlling and exploiting you, it's time to upgrade your influencing skills and techniques and turn the table around.

As you increase your power of influence, you also need to enhance your ethical stand. Don't use your newly learnt power to manipulate or selfishly control people.

The main idea is to find, select and help the right people with whom you cooperate to create and share more value for you and others. The emphasis is on collaboration and value creation while you will also learn to compete and fight when necessary to prevent others to take unfair advantage of you.

We are all programmed biologically, socially and individually. When you study and understand how these levels of programming work for people generally, for people that belong to a specific group (culture) and for the particular individual you're talking to, you will have the opportunity to leverage on it and achieve your communication goal with more success.

Levels of communication

These are the levels and areas that you need to master for effective, purpose-oriented communications (starting from below to upwards).

The basic language skill item at the bottom refers to the case where you use a foreign language to communicate like English if you are Chinese.

The creative language skill level is about using advanced language elements to make impacts: metaphors, analogies, stories, jokes, humor, sarcasm.

A myth about communication

Most people probably have never thought or learned about the essence of communication even though we talk, listen, write and read all day long. We just naturally do these without really understanding how they work.

The implicit model most people use is very simple: I have an idea, I encode it into language and sent it to the another person. They decode my message and understand it as I intended. Of course, it doesn't work like that.

No wonder why there is so much miscommunication and misunderstanding between people.

In the course you are going to learn a more complex model that will increase your power to influence people more effectively.

Just as an example, we don't hear what others say. We filter out information, we delete, ignore, modify and distort it according to our believes, knowledge, assumptions and expectations. These are formed by our unique life experiences and cultural backgrounds.

Culture

Culture is one of the invisible factors that influences the effectiveness of our understand of each other.

Culture is simple the way people in a group live their lives and interact. We all belong to multiple relatively stable groups: family, friends, school, work place, neighbourhood, nation, country. We also have from time to time a temporary identity and behave according to the cultural expectations: as customers, passengers, patients, hotel guests, tourist etc.

The values, traditions, customs, expectations, etc. are different from group to group. And this is one of the sources of misunderstanding, arguments and conflicts.

Since early childhood we automatically learned the schemas that we subconsciously apply in different situations. That is the cultural learning and behaviour. Learning the specifics of other cultures is one element of better communication.

Rational arguments vs emotional impact

Another topic that comes up during the lessons is our automatic belief and practice that we use rational arguments, data, information and logic to communicate with others and except an impact or reaction. Usually it does not work.

Relationship and emotions first. The content of your message will not have the desired outcome until the other person is in a mental, emotional and physical state that they can and want to understand you and until they trust you and like you enough. This topic is related to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Who are our clients for this course?

• teachers who want to motivate or discipline their students more effectively or have problems teaching their subjects (e.g. liberal studies which requires multiple perspectives and creativity).
• secondary and university students who want to improve their debating skills,
• business owners and managers who want to get better attitude and performance from their stuff,
• marketing and sales people who want to improve their marketing communication and increase their sales,
• parents who cannot control their kids,
• couples whose marriage deteriorated into indifference, boredom or who stopped communicating with each other,
• single men and women who want to improve their dating skills and attract the right partner.