In this new article you’ll learn how to have good communication skills.
Most people think they communicate pretty well. Then a text gets read the wrong way. A meeting runs long because nobody knew what the email was asking for. A friend goes quiet, and you replay the conversation all evening, trying to work out which sentence landed badly.
Good communication is a set of small, learnable habits rather than a fixed trait, and a lot of them run against instinct. We assume people like us less than they do. We think deep questions will feel awkward. We text when a call would land better, and we stay silent when someone would genuinely want to hear the hard thing.
The 17 ways below come from research, most of it from the last two years. A few are older studies that later work hasn’t overturned, and where that’s the case, you’ll see the year. Each one ends with something concrete you can do this week.
1. Start the conversation before you feel ready
A lot of people hold back from talking to someone new because of a quiet, nagging assumption: they probably won’t like me much. That assumption is usually wrong.
Erica Boothby and colleagues named the pattern in a 2018 paper in Psychological Science. After conversations, people consistently underestimated how much their partner liked them and enjoyed their company. It showed up with strangers in a lab, with first-year students getting to know their dorm mates, and at a personal development workshop, and it lasted for months as the dorm mates became friends. Newer work backs it up. In Susan Sprecher’s 2025 analysis of first-meeting conversations, published in The Journal of Social Psychology in November 2025, pairs of strangers were pooled across several studies, and the liking gap held up across the individual studies and the different conditions within them. One limit worth knowing: these are mostly first conversations, often in a lab. Whether the gap shrinks in long friendships is less clear.
So the voice telling you the conversation went badly is a biased narrator. If you’ve been underestimating yourself in other areas too, this is the same bias wearing different clothes.
Your move: the next time you leave a conversation sure it went badly, assume the other person liked you a notch more than you think, and act on that. Send the follow-up message.
2. Ask the second question, not just the first
Questions are the engine of conversation, but they’re not all equal.
Alison Wood Brooks, the O’Brien Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, sorts them into four types in her January 2025 book Talk. Working with colleagues, she analysed 15-minute get-to-know-you conversations among 398 strangers and found introductory questions, mirror questions, topic-switching questions and follow-ups. Mirror questions are the reflexive “Good, and you?” kind, and Brooks writes that asking more of them doesn’t make people like you more. Follow-ups, the ones that dig into what the other person just said, are what she calls the “superheroes” of the group.
Her view rests on earlier research. Karen Huang, Michael Yeomans, Brooks and colleagues reported in a 2017 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper that people who asked more questions, especially follow-ups, were better liked. Speed daters who asked more questions got more agreements to a second date. People didn’t predict any of this, which is part of why so few of us do it. The researchers also warned that rude or repetitive questions can backfire, so this isn’t a licence to interrogate anyone.
Next time, do this: when someone tells you something, resist the urge to share your own version. Ask one question that starts from their last sentence instead.
3. Listen to understand, not to reply
Most of us “listen” while drafting our response. People notice.
The biggest summary of the evidence so far comes from Avraham Kluger, Herman Aguinis, Guy Itzchakov and colleagues, published in the Journal of Business and Psychology in April 2024. They pooled 664 effect sizes covering 400,020 observations from workplaces. Here’s what perceived listening was linked to:
| Outcome | Average correlation with feeling listened to |
|---|---|
| All work outcomes combined | r = .39 |
| Relationship quality (for example, trust) | r = .51 |
| Job performance | r = .36 |
| Job performance, self-reports removed | r = .21 |
The relationship link is strongest, and the performance link shrinks when you drop self-reports but stays meaningful. Most of the data is correlational, though the authors note some effects come from experiments. Treat it as strong evidence that listening matters, not as proof that it causes every good outcome.
Nodding alone proves very little. Good listening shows you’ve actually taken something in, which is also the core of showing empathy to someone. Before you respond in your next real conversation, sum up what you heard in a sentence and check you got it right. Only then give your view.
4. Go one layer deeper than small talk
Small talk has a job. It gets you started. The trouble is that many of us never leave it, because we expect deeper topics to feel awkward.
Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley tested that expectation in 12 experiments with more than 1,800 people, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (online in September 2021, in print in 2022). Pairs of mostly strangers discussed either shallow or deep questions. Deep conversations turned out less awkward and more connecting than people predicted, and when participants had both kinds, they preferred the deep one even though they’d expected the opposite. The reason for the miscalculation was specific: people assumed strangers wouldn’t care much about their more personal answers. They did. When participants were told this beforehand, they picked deeper questions on their own. This study is older than two years, and I couldn’t find a newer replication, so it’s flagged as such.
Becoming an understanding person starts here. You can’t understand what nobody tells you.
A quick experiment: in your next coffee chat, swap one “How’s work?” for “What’s been taking up most of your headspace lately?” Notice whether it’s as awkward as you feared.
5. Put your phone out of sight
You’ve probably been on the receiving end of this. You’re mid-sentence, and the other person glances at a screen. Researchers call it phubbing, short for phone snubbing.
The newest evidence is a meta-analysis by Nie Ni and colleagues in Frontiers in Psychology, published in May 2025. It pulled together 52 studies covering 58 samples and 19,698 people in romantic relationships. Partner phubbing was linked to lower relationship satisfaction, less intimacy, lower responsiveness and more conflict and jealousy. Across 30 samples, the link with relationship satisfaction came out at about rz = −0.22, a small-to-moderate effect. The authors are clear that most of the studies were cross-sectional, so it’s correlational. Unhappy couples might also reach for their phones more.
A 2025 dyadic study led by Amanda Denes suggests one way the damage happens. When people felt their partner was phubbing them, they felt deprived of affection, and that feeling was tied to lower satisfaction. The device matters less than the message it sends, which is roughly: something else matters more than you right now.
Start small: when someone starts telling you something that matters to them, put the phone face-down in another room, or at least in a bag. Visible and silent still counts as visible.
6. Explain it as if they weren’t inside your head
Here’s a frustrating thing about expertise. The better you know something, the worse you get at explaining it.
The mechanism goes like this. You know the background, so your brain quietly fills in every gap as you speak. Because the gaps feel filled, you can’t easily imagine what your words sound like to someone without that background. So you skip steps, use shorthand and drop jargon. The listener gets lost, and often doesn’t say so, because admitting confusion feels embarrassing. You walk away thinking you were clear. This is called the curse of knowledge.
The classic demonstration is Elizabeth Newton’s 1990 doctoral study at Stanford. Tappers drummed the rhythm of well-known songs on a table and predicted listeners would name about half of them. Listeners identified 3 out of 120, or 2.5%. The song was playing in the tappers’ heads, so the taps sounded obvious to them. This study is old and comes from a dissertation, but it’s an experiment, so the gap between prediction and reality is well established. How much it explains your specific misunderstandings at work is an inference.
Here’s a simple way in: before you explain something, ask yourself what someone who missed the last three meetings would need to hear first. Then start there. It’s closely related to seeing things from different points of view, just applied to information instead of opinions.
7. Disagree in a way that invites them in
Disagreement goes badly when each side feels unheard. There’s good evidence that a few specific phrases change the temperature.
Michael Yeomans, Julia Minson, Hanne Collins and Charles Dorison call it conversational receptiveness, and their paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (accepted June 2024) ran on a collective sample of 17,184 people. Receptiveness spreads. When one person used it, the other person tended to start using it too, among students on online forums and government leaders in a lab. In preregistered experiments, training one side made their political opponent more receptive, and even one receptive message improved how the two sides saw each other.
What does it look like? Their earlier 2020 work in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes pointed to things like acknowledging the other view, stating your view as your own belief rather than a fact, and hedging where honest (“sometimes”, “in many cases”). It’s a large part of learning to be tolerant of people’s opinions without giving up your own. One caveat: receptiveness is for honest disagreement. If someone is denying what you both saw happen, that’s a different problem, and responding to gaslighting takes a different approach.
Test it this week: next time you disagree, open with “I can see why you’d think that, because…” and finish the sentence honestly before giving your view.
8. Put the point in the first line
At work, every message lands in a crowd. Your email is fighting everything else in the inbox for a few seconds of attention.
Microsoft’s Work Trend Index special report from June 2025, based on aggregated Microsoft 365 data, found the average worker was interrupted roughly every two minutes during core hours, about 275 times a day. People received an average of 117 emails and 153 Teams messages daily, and 57% of meetings were unscheduled calls. Two caveats: Microsoft sells the tools it’s measuring, and its May 2026 annual report focuses on AI rather than repeating these numbers, so June 2025 is the newest edition of this data I found.
In that kind of environment, length costs you. Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink of Harvard tested it in a field experiment with roughly 7,000 school district leaders, described in their 2023 book Writing for Busy Readers. A concise email got a 4.8% response rate, against 2.7% for a wordier version asking for the same thing. The book is older than two years, but the finding fits everything newer about attention at work.
If your manager is the kind who hovers, crisp updates also help when you’re trying to deal with a micromanager, because they answer the question before it gets asked. Write the ask or the decision in the first sentence, then cut anything the reader doesn’t need to act on.
9. Spell it out when the message matters
“ty”, “idk”, “rn”. They save two seconds. They may cost more than that.
David Fang of Stanford and colleagues ran eight experiments with more than 5,300 participants, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (online November 2024, in the January 2025 issue). People who used abbreviations came across as less sincere, and they got fewer and shorter replies. The pattern showed up in lab experiments, in live chats, and in an analysis of real Tinder conversations. In one study, 80% of participants predicted others wouldn’t care either way. Only a small minority guessed the real effect.
The mechanism is perceived effort. Spelling a word out signals you took a moment, and shortcuts signal the opposite. Fang himself notes that abbreviating is fine when sincerity isn’t the point, like a quick text to a delivery driver.
Give it a go: for one week, write out full words in messages to people you care about, and see whether the replies change.
10. Pick up the phone more often than feels natural
Texting feels safer. That’s exactly why we overuse it.
Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley tested this in a 2021 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. When people planned to reconnect with an old friend, most expected a phone call would create a stronger bond. Yet about two thirds still said they’d prefer email, mainly because they expected a call to be awkward. When people were randomly assigned, the callers felt more connected to their friend, and the calls weren’t more awkward. In a second set of experiments with strangers, voice-based conversations created stronger bonds than text-based ones, and adding video added little beyond the voice. The study is older than two years, so it’s flagged, but the core finding hasn’t been challenged in anything I found.
Your voice carries tone, warmth and timing that text strips out. It’s also hard to misread a laugh.
Your move: think of one person you’d normally text this week, and call them instead. Keep it short if you like. The point is the voice.
11. Write the personal messages yourself
AI writing tools are now everywhere at work. For routine updates, they’re fine. For anything personal, people can tell, and they judge you for it.
In a survey-based study of more than 1,000 professionals published in the International Journal of Business Communication in August 2025, Coman and Peter Cardon (Cardon is at the University of Southern California) showed people workplace emails written with low, medium or high AI help. When supervisors used heavy AI assistance, only 40% to 52% of employees saw them as sincere, compared with 83% for messages with light AI help. Professionalism ratings dropped too, from 95% to between 69% and 73%. Light editing, like fixing grammar, was broadly accepted. The penalty hit hardest on relational messages such as congratulations and praise. These were scenario ratings, not observations of real teams, so the exact percentages are a guide rather than a forecast.
If people on your team seem to be quietly cracking under pressure, a polished but generic thank-you won’t reach them. One rule to steal: let AI fix your spelling, but write the thanks, the apology and the congratulations in your own words, even if they come out a little clumsy.
12. Talk in examples, not adjectives
“I’m a strong communicator” is the weakest way to prove you’re a strong communicator.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers asked employers about this in its Job Outlook 2026 survey, collected in August and September 2025 and published that November. Seventy percent said they use skills-based hiring, up from 65% a year earlier, and employers said they want candidates to give examples of how they used a skill rather than just list it. In NACE’s Spring Update, run in February and March 2026, employers again rated communication among the most important skills for new graduates, and said they were less impressed with graduates’ actual communication than with their teamwork.
Picture this hypothetical: two candidates are asked about teamwork. One says she’s collaborative and a great listener. The other describes the week a project fell behind, the call she set up with the client, and what changed afterwards. The second answer is the one an interviewer remembers.
It applies well beyond interviews, and to most of the conversations you’ll have at work. Write down two or three short stories from your own experience that show how you handle pressure, disagreement and mistakes, so you have them ready when it counts.
13. Tell people about the spinach in their teeth
Spotting a problem someone else hasn’t noticed puts you in an awkward spot. Most people say nothing.
Nicole Abi-Esber, Jennifer Abel, Juliana Schroeder and Francesca Gino looked at why in a 2022 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Across five experiments with 1,984 participants, people in a position to give feedback consistently underestimated how much the other person wanted it. The gap showed up between strangers and also between friends and romantic partners. One fix helped: asking people to imagine themselves in the other person’s position made them more likely to speak up, though it didn’t fully close the gap. The paper is from 2022, so treat it as older evidence.
Say you notice a typo on a colleague’s slide five minutes before a client call. You’d want to know, right? So would they.
Next time, do this: before you decide to stay quiet, ask yourself, “If this were me, would I want to be told?” If the answer is yes, say it privately and quickly. And if you want the reverse to happen more often, it helps to know how to ask for feedback from your manager so people feel safe being honest with you.
14. Use a script when the stakes are high
Spontaneous is lovely at a dinner party. When mistakes are costly, structure beats charm.
Hospitals learned this the hard way. When doctors hand patients over at the end of a shift, important details get lost, and communication failures are a leading cause of serious medical errors. A team led by Amy Starmer and Christopher Landrigan at Boston Children’s Hospital built a handoff program called I-PASS: Illness severity, Patient summary, Action list, Situation awareness and contingency planning, and Synthesis by receiver. That last step means the person taking over repeats back what they heard. The program also included training, observation and a campaign to keep it going.
In the original study across nine pediatric residency programs, published in 2014, medical errors fell by 23% and preventable adverse events by 30%. A later rollout across 32 hospitals, 12 community and 20 academic, published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine in late 2022 and summarised in a January 2024 report to the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, found provider-reported handoff-related adverse events fell by more than 40%. That figure relies on clinicians’ own reports and a before-and-after design, so it’s encouraging rather than conclusive.
Borrow the idea: for any handover that matters, from a project to a sick child’s medication schedule, agree on a short order for the key points and end by asking the other person to say back what they’ll do.
15. Say no without the long apology
Plenty of people say yes to things they don’t want to do because no feels rude. The fear is usually bigger than the fallout.
Julian Givi of West Virginia University and Colleen Kirk of the New York Institute of Technology published a paper on this in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in December 2023. In a pilot study, 77% of respondents admitted accepting an invitation to something they didn’t want to attend because they worried about the consequences of declining. Across five experiments with more than 2,000 participants, people who declined consistently overestimated how angry the inviter would be, how much it would hurt the relationship, and how likely they were to be left off the next invitation. Inviters tended to think about the reasons behind a no, not just the no itself. The paper is from late 2023, which puts it outside the two-year window, but nothing newer I found contradicts it.
A clear, kind no is also a basic skill when you’re trying to work with a controlling person who treats every refusal as a challenge.
A quick experiment: the next time you want to decline, use one sentence of thanks, one sentence of no, and, if you mean it, one alternative. Skip the three paragraphs of explanation.
16. Leave conversations on purpose
Ending a conversation well is part of communicating well, and almost nobody gets it right.
Adam Mastroianni, the lead author of a 2021 study in PNAS, compared conversation to driving on a highway. You can leave at any exit, but you can’t stop the moment you feel like it, because you’d crash into everything around you. The comparison holds in one important way: leaving takes coordination with other people, so you hold on past the point you wanted to go. It breaks down in another: highway exits are fixed, while in conversation you can create one whenever you choose to say so.
His team’s data shows how rarely we manage it. In two studies, only about 2% of conversations ended when both people wanted them to, and people were poor at guessing when their partner wanted to stop. In about half of conversations, both people wanted it to be shorter, just at different points. Mastroianni has also pointed out that people tend to enjoy conversations more than they expect. Speed is beside the point here. A clean exit is what you’re after. The study is from 2021, so it’s flagged as older.
When you’re ready to go, say so warmly and specifically: “I need to head off, but I loved hearing about your trip.” Then actually leave, rather than hovering for another ten minutes.
17. Call your nerves excitement
A racing heart before a presentation feels like a sign that things will go badly. It doesn’t have to be.
In a 2014 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Alison Wood Brooks had people say “I am excited” or “I am calm” out loud before a stressful speech. Both nerves and excitement involve high arousal, so relabelling the feeling is easier than trying to switch it off. The “excited” group felt more excited, spoke longer and was rated by judges as more persuasive, competent and confident.
Newer evidence adds an important twist. Michelle Poynter and Marcia Smith Pasqualini ran a direct replication, published in Psychology of Language and Communication by the University of Warsaw in June 2025. The self-reports replicated almost exactly. The observer ratings didn’t: judges saw no difference in performance between the groups. So the honest conclusion is that this reframe reliably changes how you feel, but it may not change how you come across. Feeling better before you speak is still worth having.
If your body needs more than a reframe, these ways to calm your nervous system help with the physical side. Test it this week: before your next high-stakes conversation, say “I’m excited” out loud, then notice whether the feeling shifts.
What to do when you slip
You will interrupt someone. You’ll check your phone mid-story, or send a lazy “k” to someone who deserved a real answer. That doesn’t mean the habits aren’t working.
Changing how you talk is habit change, and habits take longer than most people think. A systematic review by Ben Singh and colleagues at the University of South Australia, published in Healthcare in December 2024, covered 20 studies and 2,601 participants. In the studies that measured it, habits took a median of 59 to 66 days to form, with individual times ranging from 4 to 335 days. The review was about health habits like exercise and eating, not conversation, so treat the numbers as a rough guide. But the authors’ main point carries over: the popular idea of 21 days doesn’t hold up, and habit strength builds gradually from the first repetitions.
So when you slip, repair it on the spot if you can. “Sorry, I cut you off, go on” fixes most interruptions in seconds. “I wasn’t really listening just then, can you tell me again?” is honest and rarely held against you. Then pick one habit from this list and stick with it for two months before you add another. Growing into a better communicator is part of the slower work of developing your personality, and that work is rarely a straight line.
Final thoughts
The research keeps pointing in one direction. Other people like us more than we think, want deeper conversations than we offer, and care more about our honesty than we expect. Read that way, most of the skills above work as small corrections to pessimistic guesses about other people.
You don’t need all 17. Pick the one that made you wince a little in recognition, and practise it this week. For more ways to grow, browse the Self Improvement section.
