In this episode Flo Akinbiyi talks about how improving our communication skills can help us  not only with our career, but with our relationships and with everything in our lives.

Flo defines communication coaching as helping people to make an impact through communication. And he works on three areas very specifically: presentation skills, public speaking and virtual communication.

Here are some highlights of this episode:

I don't think there's one specific need or there's one specific problem. Every individual is different. I always like to speak about communication superpowers; everybody has their own communication superpowers. And therefore, I don't think there's this one common problem. I think, one of the most obvious problems would be bad PowerPoint presentations. That is definitely the number one problem. But then of course, there's a few common things that I see.

I don't believe that there's one approach to communication, or that you have to train people in order to speak in one specific way. Every person should find their own way of speaking and their authentic way of speaking.

We look first at the content. What is the content that you're communicating? Who are the audiences? And how can we structure this content better? How can we make it more engaging? How can we turn it into winning content by finding out what's the ‘wow effect’? So, we've got a few tools that we need to look at here. Then, we look at the delivery. So that's really the personal level. That's about your voice, your body language, how do you create a connection with the audience? Also, the ‘wow factor’ for delivering. There's so much that you can do. And then, the third part is always the format. So, what is the format? Are you going to record a podcast? Are you going to be on a stage, in a meeting room? Are you talking to investors? What is it?

Everybody can train their voice, everybody, because it's a muscle. So, you can train it. There's no excuses. If you're not happy with your voice, go out and learn singing or do work with a voice coach. Looking at your body language and your voice, if you work on these aspects, your communication improves massively.

If you speak monotone and that's what many people in the corporate world would do, if you speak like this and you speak with low energy then basically, just raise the energy. There's this very simple rule that I’ve learned years ago is do 20% more and that can work for anything. 

Once you improve yourself on one area of your life, it will trickle into other areas of your life as well and you have no idea what can happen.