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Today we're going to do a series of videos about effective communications at work. This is one of the most important soft skills at work. But because it is a soft skill, it is really not taught much anywhere. For myself, three years ago, I had the fortune to learn this from a mentor. He did a very thorough presentation, and discussion about effective communications at work. I learned so much from that presentation and my career has taken off since then. The benefits I received from doing better communications not only includes faster career development, but also better relationships with my colleagues, and just a stronger sense of my professional identity. So after three years, I think it's time to summarize what I learned from my practice and give back to the community. Because communication is so important. There are actually a lot of hype videos and books and blogs talking about communication. A lot of them focus on the skills and tips of doing communication. However, if you don't know the core or the goal of effective communications, then maybe those tips and the skills are not useful and sometimes are even bad. because the more skills you implement in your communications, the more disingenuous you can came across in your communications. And being disingenuous is actually very bad in communications. Meanwhile, the core of effective communications are really under discussed. That is the gap. Without further ado, let me just give you right now. So the core of effective communications, it's really exchanging information, emotion, and intention. There are two parts. One, exchanging information is a two-way street. Most of the time, it's really about understanding than about convincing. The second part is it's not only about understanding the information, but also about understanding the emotions and intentions behind that information. That is the core. There are a lot of goals in effective communications, For example, number one, make decisions, but we want to make an informed decision and to make an informed decision, we need to understand each other. We need to understand the context, and we need to get alignment. That is why we communicate. Second, we want to improve productivity. We have a lot of thrash in our daily work. If we do effective communications, we can build a trusting environment so we can focus on work. The third goal of effective communication is to build relationships. The simple truth is we humans are sentimental. When we trust someone, we'll assume good intentions. If we don't trust someone, we'll assume bad intentions. Even if we have the same outcome. Depending on your relationship with the receiving party, it can have very different impact or perception. So if you want to work to have real impact, it is almost stupid to not pay attention to relationships. The fourth one is managing your stakeholders engagements and expectations. Just think about your daily work. Are you tired of your stakeholders, whether it's a boss or your colleague, or your collaborator or your customer? Constantly on your ass? Are they just checking on you? And when you produce that outcome, do you know if the outcome is going to delight or disappoint your stakeholder? Do our stakeholders trust you? Do they leave you a lot of freedom? Do they engage when they need to? A lot of this is not about outcome itself, but about using effective communications to set up engagement and expectations along the way. The fifth goal is bring visibilities to our project and to ourself. Whether it is for your promotion, for getting necessary feedbacks, or just having more impact. It is important to have visibility. Effective communications can help you establish visibility. The sixth goal is resolve conflicts. We are bounded to have conflicts in our daily work. How we handle and the resolve conflicts can carry us a long way The last goal is build better culture. How an organization communicates often is a good indicator of this organization's culture. So if everyone contributes to having effective communication, the organization actually can have better culture in the long run. So this is the core and the seven goals of effective communication. If you're interested, in the following videos, I'm going to talk about the principles where we apply effective communication, most common mistakes, how to do effective communications in writing, in presentations, and in oral communications, even in random encounters. The, I'll share some places we can learn effective communications and just keep improving. Those videos hasn't been made yet, so I want to get your feedback, your comments of what you are interested in. I look forward to your feedback and see you next time. Bye.