 Good evening friends, amongst us we have S. Varusha, assistant professor of English who is teaching in Lady Doke College, Madurai, Tamil Nadu. And we are following her up at, she should say, some session because I had seen one of her YouTube session which actually created an impact. So I thought why not ask her to take a session on creating impact through communications, the tips and strategies. During this course, she would also tell us how your communication skills can be improved, what are the facets for that. Being a weekend, I will request straight away to S. Varusha who has been kind enough to accept our invite to share her insights. Ma'am unmute, unmute, unmute. Mejo, we knew you. Yeah, it's, it's good now. Thank you, sir. Thank you for giving me this opportunity and I truly value it. So I would like to start the session by giving a disclaimer. I'm not a communication coach, nor do I consider myself an expert in this subject. But having been a teacher of English literature for almost 10 years now, I can confidently say that communication is what earns my daily bread. So I would like to start the session by emphasizing how much of importance communication has in our everyday life. So you can see that communication is a two way process, and we mostly value speaking as a skill, but not so much listening. So my focus is going to be more on listening than speaking during this session. Listening is very integral in conversations and listening is also a skill that we are losing these days. If I have to point out, you can see that parents don't listen to their children, children don't listen to their teachers, teachers don't listen to their students, and this goes on endlessly creating a world where people don't feel heard or valued. So you have to understand that listening plays a pivotal role in communication, particularly in creating impact on people with whom we engage in conversations. So I would like to focus on what we call active listening. What is active listening? It is an active process that we engage in where we listen, not just to get the message, but to understand it. So listening to understand, I could say, that is what we call active listening. How do we achieve active listening? I believe that there are a few things that we need to avoid. I would call them pitfalls that we need to avoid to attain active listening successfully. So when we eliminate these things, it helps us arrive at our goal, which is active listening. Just as we eliminate wrong answers when we answer a question or wrong options when we want to arrive at a decision. So the first thing that I would like us all to avoid is interrupting while listening. You can ask yourself this question, how many times have you been interrupted while you were in a conversation? How did that make you feel? You can also ask yourself another question, which is how many times have you interrupted someone while they were speaking? So you could imagine how it would make one feel. You have to understand that oftentimes we interrupt unintentionally and sometimes intentionally. But whether it is intentional or unintentional, it is going to be a disruption to the speaker. Imagine in this webinar someone just unmutes himself or herself accidentally. Yes, it is completely unintentional, but it is still going to be a distraction, not just for the speaker, but also for the other listeners. But imagine if this were to happen intentionally and someone does this to sabotage something or someone does this to ruin a conversation. How would it make the speaker feel? Oftentimes the speaker gets distracted, one. Second, the speaker gets hurt. This can even be in a personal conversation between a husband and a wife, a parent and a child, a teacher and a student, or between two colleagues at work, peers in school. It can be any of these scenarios. So we have to understand interrupting is something that we ought not to do as a listener. Number two, this is the second pitfall that we have to avoid, steering the conversation back to us. Most often when we engage in conversations, for instance, let's say there is a person telling us how they met with an accident. The listener automatically steps in and starts narrating the time when they themselves had met with an accident and start sharing their own experiences without giving space for the speaker to express his or her own experience. So you can see what happens here is the intention could be good where the listener wants to make the speaker feel empathized. But the timing is pretty wrong because you have not given the space for the speaker to express himself or herself. This oftentimes happens in conversations and it creates a very bad impression of you as a person. So people might think that you're not very keen and listening to other people speak. And that is going to be a huge hindrance in your attempts to create an impact through communication. So as I earlier mentioned, when we say communication, the focus automatically goes to speaking, but listening plays an equal role or even more an important role than speaking to us because we spend a major part of our life listening, not speaking. So we have to understand that when we have the urge to step in and share our own experiences, our own feelings and our own thoughts when someone is speaking, it should not be done because no two experiences are the same. So equating yours with them is not going to help. Yes, you want to take an empathetic stand, but that cannot be done by equating yours with them or theirs with yours. So validating the other person's experiences more important than equating it with yours. And when you look at all of this from a psychological perspective, this type of steering the conversation back to you is called narcissistic listening. So why do we call it narcissistic, we all know who a narcissist is a narcissist is a person who is very self absorbed and self centered. So if you engage in narcissistic listening, then it means that you are engaging in a self centered self absorbed kind of listening where you want to hog all the attention. This can be a huge deterrent in developing relationships in creating an impact on the people that you interact with. So you'd be happy to understand that the urge to tell our stories is very natural. It's also very inherent as humans we all want to be heard more than we want to be listeners, but listening as I already mentioned this very very important. We live in a world of selfies and social media so there is more of this urge to share one's stories. But I would suggest that the appropriate thing to do in such situations is wait for the speaker to finish speaking and then make the speaker feel validated. You want to acknowledge their own experiences, their own views, their own ideas and their own feelings, and then when given the space you could express yourself. And then you could maybe show your empathy by sharing how you have also undergone a similar experience and you could relate with what they are saying. So in that case, it doesn't become narcissistic rather it becomes empathetic. So we need to understand the difference between the two. The third pitfall that we need to avoid is focusing on conversations or things that only interest you, and once that interest veins or once that interest is gone, people stop listening. So you can also call this selective listening, where imagine there is a conversation happening between two colleagues about an impending promotion that they have. They are sharing their apprehensions with one another. And then all of a sudden one of the colleagues starts sharing a personal problem that they are facing in their own lives, and the other one loses interest and they stop listening. So imagine now, how would you feel if you were the colleague sharing the personal problem, and it is your peer who stops listening. So we have to understand that such selective listening is not a good practice when you want to be an impactful communicator. So you have to understand that this can also extend to arguments, discussions and brainstorming that we have in our professional environments where you only want to listen at times when you agree with people, when people share views similar to yours, when people share views that are impressive to you, when people praise you, when people say nice things about you, but other times you don't pay attention. You don't want to play the role of an active listener. That is something very manipulative I would say, and as professionals, we should steer away from such behavior. The fourth thing, which is a very major pitfall that we need to avoid is scheming to undermine or criticize or provide a negative feedback to the speaker after the conversation is over. Some people they listen only to criticize. So they would pay attention to everything you say, and you might be thinking that they were actively listening to you. But as soon as the conversation gets over, they ambush you with a criticism, they ambush you to hurt you. So it is like a tiger waiting behind the bushes to pounce on its prey. That kind of a behavior is also very, very manipulative, but most often we will experience this in our work environment and also in personal experiences when it is a conflicted relationship. You can see this happen between husbands and wives. You can see this happen between siblings. You can see this happen between a parent and a child. And one professional example that I can give you is, imagine it is some senior asking you for ideas on an important project, and you think that they value your views and your experience and your perspectives, and you are more than happy to share it with that person. But as soon as you finish sharing, they say something to humiliate you in front of your peers. They say something to embarrass you in front of your peers, and you understand that they had heard you only to insult you. So this is called aggressive listening. The term itself tells us how much of an aggressive behavior this is. This is the kind of behavior that we should stay away from in our workplace. It is also the kind of behavior that we should stay away from in our personal relationships if we want to have friends, if we want to have peace at home. So we have to understand that this does not mean that we don't criticize people. This does not mean that when someone comes up with a bad idea, you don't tell them that it is a bad idea. But you should not feel that make that person feel ambushed. That's the whole idea behind this aggressive listening. So you have to understand that you have to give them constructive feedback. Imagine that you're working in a team and someone comes up with an idea which hadn't worked in the past, but they want to implement it again. Maybe as a peer or as a senior, you could tell them that we need to tread cautiously and we need to step away from the mistakes that we had done the first time, but still encourage that person so that they could come with a better idea. So you should not shoot it down at the first try. Shooting someone down at the first try affects their confidence and you can imagine yourself in that situation be a little empathetic and try to not undermine that person or insult that person in front of others. So these are the four pitfalls that we should stay away from when we want to create an impact on our audience or on the person with whom we are having a conversation. So you might have this question in your mind, how could listening create an impact. And I would like to tell you that most often we value people who listen to us. You could think of that one friend that you cherish. You could think of that one member of the family to whom you always run towards when you have a problem. You could think of that one colleague with whom you have a wonderful record. And then you ask yourself, is that because that person speaks well, is that because that person is full of ideas, or is that because that person listens to you. Is that because you feel visible in that person's presence. So sometimes there are people who make us feel invisible. You might even pinch yourself to check if you exist or not because that is the kind of treatment they would give you. We don't want to be that person. So you have to understand that listening plays a very important role. And most often we cherish relationships where we are heard. Where we feel that the other person is always willing to lend their ears, where they are always willing to give a shoulder. So that becomes very, very important. So you can even try this as an experiment. The next time you are having a conversation with someone, pay attention to them. Listen to that person. And you will see that that person leaves with a sense of comfort, a sense of, you know, peace, and they will come back to you the next time they have a problem because people don't want solutions. They want you to hear to them. You know, that is all they want. They don't want you to provide them with solutions. I think most people have the resources to figure out their problems. So as listeners, our role is not to give them solutions. Our role is to engage them in that conversation, understand them and make them feel valued. So I have already given you four things that we need to avoid to be an active listener. Now I would like to give you four things that we need to do to be an active listener. So this could be the tips or the strategies that you could use to be an active listener. This is not rocket science, but listening is a skill that needs to be acquired. Unfortunately, it is not taught in school, even though we have LSRW, you know, listening, speaking, reading and writing. Listening is not something that they teach us in school, unfortunately. And most professionals are not trained how to listen. As parents, we don't listen to our children. And most often this affects people. So there are four tips that I would like to give you, based on research, based on the numerous journal articles and books that I had read. There are four things that you could adopt to be an active listener. The first is focus on the speaker, prioritize their feelings, their experience, their perspective, and give your focus only to the person to whom you are listening. Do not let your thoughts come in the way. Do not be distracted by other environmental barriers that are there or physical or physiological or psychological barriers that are there. The second point is giving your undivided attention. See, we have to understand when we say active listening, it is an active process. There are studies that show that when you listen, you are spending a certain amount of energy. So it's not a passive thing. It's not that the listener is not engaging in anything. We are engaging in something that is very, very active, which is listening to you, listening to the speaker. So you have to understand that giving your undivided attention is very, very important. The third one is consciously control the urge to interrupt. See, this again takes us to the pitfalls that I talked about, which is interrupting and hogging attention, that narcissistic attitude. We need to stay away from that. We need to put aside our own feelings and thoughts and stop running that internal commentary. Most often when we listen, we are speaking within our own selves. There are a million thoughts that are huddled in our brain. And even now, when this webinar is going on, you might try to focus, you might try to give your undivided attention, but you might also engage in the stream of consciousness in your mind where there are so many thoughts that are disrupting your attention. But consciously, you have to make an effort to get back to what is happening, get back to the presence. So I think mindfulness is very, very important to be a good listener. This may get a little too psychological, but you need to be a person who is self aware. You need to be a person who is mindful of one's own feelings and the environment. So if you are that sort of a person, then you will painlessly effortlessly do this, which is active listening. The fourth thing that we need to do is once someone finishes speaking, you need to paraphrase what they said, restate what they said. Put in your own words what you've heard. Why do we do this? One, it lets the speaker know that we paid attention, therefore they feel happy, they feel validated. Two, it clarifies certain things. Imagine, since a lot of lawyers are there in this forum, imagine you're talking to your clients and your client has said a lot of things. So you as a listener have paid attention to everything. And at the end, you rephrase, you put it in your own words what you have heard, and at that point you realize that you have misunderstood a few things that your client has said. This gives you the space to clarify it. So what do you do next? Now that you have paraphrased it, you have understood that there is some miscommunication that has happened. You ask questions. This can also work in an academic setting between a teacher and a student. Most often teachers, we assume that we have done what we wanted to do. The mission is accomplished. But then we ask some student in the class to paraphrase what we have said, summarize or sum up what we have said, and then we find that there are few gaps. There is the lacuna, you know, the gaps that need to be filled. And that's when we ask students to ask questions. We tell them, okay, so you haven't understood the concept, you could ask questions. So once they ask questions, it gives us the space to clarify it. So this I think is very, very important. So what happens when we do these four things, the first one, as I already mentioned this focus, the second one is undivided attention. The fourth one is consciously step away from running an internal commentary or interrupting. And the fourth one, as I have mentioned this paraphrase and ask questions. What happens when we do these four things, it takes us to two levels of listening, which are very useful to us. One is critical listening. The other one is empathic listening. We already saw the back practices that are there in listening, like selective listening, aggressive listening, and interrupting, selective listening. So those are things that we need to avoid. But critical listening and empathic listening are good practices. How are they good practices. So if you are engaging in critical listening, it means that you have understood what the speaker has said, and you are now in a position where as someone who engages in a conversation, you can now try to understand what the speaker is saying, and you can also make informed decisions. So again, in the case of a lawyer, you have understood what your client has said and you have been analyzing whatever they said as they were speaking. Now, you will have a few points that you could give to your client to steer the case in a direction that is favorable to the client. You can be persuasive, you can arrive at decisions easier. All of this will happen only if you engage in critical listening. And then empathic listening. As the very word says, you understand the feelings of the speaker and you make the speaker feel acknowledged. This can help personally and professionally as well. Most often, we don't feel heard when we are talking to a superior at work or a senior at work. So if you are a senior at work, listen to your juniors, it can be in the case of the profession of law, it can be in teaching, it can be in any profession for that matter, you can be an entrepreneur, it can be any scenario. If you are a person with experience, it is very important that you engage in empathic listening, where you make this novice, this amateur, this young person, this inexperienced person feel visible and hurt. So you're setting up a role model for that person one, two, you are making them work at their optimal level because they are now personally invested in doing the best for you. See, it's actually quite a strategy. It's not manipulative, because once you start practicing empathic listening, at one point you start being in that. So it's like you start up as pretence, but at one point you start doing it actually. So when you engage in empathic listening, you can see that you can get the optimal out of the people that you work with. So this is going to be very beneficial for you in the work environment. This can also be pretty beneficial in a personal relationship. Imagine it is your partner saying something and you are empathetically listening to them, make that person feel valued. The person is now going to be more connected to you than they were in the past. So you can see it can transform relationships. Listening can transform relationships and that I think is very, very important. So now that we have covered listening, I would like to move on to speaking. We might have heard a lot of tips and strategies that have been given on how to speak effectively. So I'm going to keep it very simple. I don't want to complicate it. There's not much a person can do within 45 minutes. So whatever time I have left, I would like to leave with an impact, as the title itself says. So the first point that I would like to emphasize is to feel confident, act confident. You might wonder what she's doing. She's asking us to act, but it is an established finding in psychology that actions give rise to feelings. So whether it be a presentation at work, or a conversation that you are having at home, or it can be a personal conversation that you're having with your boss. Fattling nerves is something more common than you could even imagine. All of us have this anxiety within us that is constantly there when we want to communicate when we want to express ourselves. The technical term that is used for this is communication apprehension where you feel that anxiety inside of you when you want to express yourself. It's not just public speaking. Please understand that social anxiety need not be only while you are making an attempted public speaking. It can even be one simple conversation that you're having with a colleague. It can be a harmless conversation that you are having at work. In the words of McCroskey, I quote, fear or anxiety associated with either real or anticipated communication with another person or persons. This is what he calls communication apprehension. I would like to repeat. Fear or anxiety associated with either real or anticipated communication with another person or persons on boats. So it is absolutely natural to make, to feel anxiety when you want to communicate. How do we overcome this anxiety? I would say, and also a lot of psychologists say this, until you arrive at the point where you feel confident, act confident. It is not pretension. It is rather training your mind to get where you want. You want to be a confident person, but you are still not there yet. So you are training yourself. You are wiring your brain so that you can become that confident person. People say practice makes perfect, but no conversation is perfect. It can never be perfect. There's always scope for improvement as with all things in life, so you can never attain perfection. And to try to be a perfectionist is something that actually hinders you from effectively communicating. You should never try for perfection. You should only try what you could do best, which will not be perfect at all, anytime. So you have to understand that one thing that greatly helps in making yourself feel confident is expertise in your subject. You might wonder, this is no secret. Everybody knows this. Yes, everybody knows this, but nobody emphasizes on it when they talk about communication. When people talk about communication, they talk about how important it is for you to be good in English. When people talk about communication, they say how important it is to have a perfect body language, how to engage in gestures. But none of these things will help you if you cannot have a command over your field of study, your field of expertise. So I would suggest that developing that is very, very important. At this point, I would like to give you a small illustration from my personal life and how acting confident has helped me feel confident in the true sense of the word. So I was someone with a lot of social inhibitions. I struggled greatly with making friends in school, in college, I had very few friends. I would experience social anxiety at any given moment and that impeded my conversations with my peers, my teachers, and in the beginning of my career, even with my students. So it is completely unimaginable for me to strike up a conversation with a stranger. It will give me jitters. I'm not at all exaggerating. It was very, very challenging for me. So imagine how I could have felt or how I would have felt when I entered this profession of teaching, where I have to communicate with people on an everyday basis. As I already mentioned, it is what helps me earn my daily bread. So if I were to communicate with people on an everyday basis with such high levels of social anxiety and social inhibition, imagine what kind of a situation I would have been in. But I found a way in which I could handle it. There were even physical markers of my fear like mild trembling of hands, palpitation. I would feel all of this when I was trying to have a conversation with someone. It can be one to one or one to many, any scenario. But over the years, I realized that entering a classroom as a teacher, fully prepared, armed with hours of reading and hours of learning, gives oneself an undeniable confidence. So the confidence that I possess now has not come from my inherent personality as a person, but it has come from the hours that I have spent reading, the hours that I have spent honing my skills. So now I can confidently say that my social anxiety has come down at a considerable level, but I still cannot say that it has disappeared completely. It's still there. It hasn't vanished. Only the physical markers have gone away. So I no longer have trembling of hands. I no longer have palpitation. But there is still this uncomfortable feeling that I have every time I engage in a conversation. So as I already mentioned, the first point is to feel confident and to feel confident you have to act confident. So fear is something that all of us grapple with. And sometimes it is not bad. It is a sign that you care. As a teacher, I have heard even my seniors emphasize this a lot. As a teacher, you should feel anxious every time you get into a class. This is a sign that you care about your students. As a lawyer, every time you take up a case, you need to have this anxiety inside of you. It means that you care about your clients. And as a business person, an entrepreneur, you need to have this fear inside of you every time you sign a deal because it means you care. So the day we stop fearing, we stop caring. So fear is not our enemy. Rather, we should treat it like an ally. We should treat it like a friend. Just embrace it. And that is one way in which we can make an impact in our conversations. So someone who converses with you, who engages in a conversation with you, need not know that you are afraid with it. They don't have to know it. It's enough if you know it. But you should still find ways in which you could handle it. And there's no readymade solution for this. Each one has to figure out his or her own way of maneuvering through this fear, as I did, as many of my students do, many of my peers have done. So the second thing that we need to focus on to speak effectively is to be honest, to be open. I know there's a lot of talk that we engage in on honesty, but not many of us practice it. This is the best way to make an impact on your listener. When you speak from your heart and not just from what you have heard or what you have read, mere Buddhist knowledge, you know, when you speak from your heart, it makes an impact. So it does not matter if you're making eye contact while making a presentation. It does not matter if you are engaging in gestures in an animated manner. It does not even matter if you have a stellar PPT or a hundred odd slides that you could use while making a presentation. None of these things matter. What truly matters is what you are saying and your conviction in the topic. So it takes us back to the first point, confidence in yourself. That's the first thing. The second is conviction in your ideas. You will have this conviction only when you are honest and when you are open. A person who is manipulative can never have conviction in himself or herself. The society might think that they do, but in the heart of their hearts, they would know that they don't have this conviction because they are not being sincere. They are not being genuine. They are not being open and that kind of an impact cannot last long. So we have to understand your confidence in yourself and the conviction in your ideas are very infectious. Yes, infectious. They can influence the listeners to a very great extent. You can't undermine the power of truth. Yes, it's a very cliche statement, but it's very true. So you can never undermine the power of truth. So as a teacher, I attend a lot of seminars and I know for truth that an impressive presentation need not necessarily be something that is useful to the audience or something that is impactful. As a teacher, we are most often required by the government to attend a lot of orientation programs, a lot of refresher courses and sometimes a lot of seminars just for the sake of disseminating knowledge, but most often these seminars don't leave an impact on us. As soon as the seminar is over, we might be raving about the speaker saying, oh, what an impressive presentation. They did this, they did that. But then half an hour later, if someone asks us, what did you learn? We are like, I don't remember, but the speaker was very good. So you can see how shallow this is. Most often speakers use humor as a means to attain success in their speeches. Success is equated to a round of applause at the end of the program. But does that mean that they have made an impact? No, it is an astounding note. They haven't made an impact. They have fooled the audience into thinking that they made an impact. So in some way they have succeeded, but the success is short-lived. So you have to understand that when the audience get back home after such a humorous session, they would remember the jokes, but they wouldn't remember the content of the speech or the content of the seminar. So the impact is not determined by the impressiveness of the speaker or the impressiveness of the presentation, rather it is determined by how much of what you've heard could you retain. For this, you also need to be a good listener, but now we are only focusing on speaking. So as a speaker, you should ask yourself, have you left an impact on the audience? And that impact can happen only when you focus on the contents. So if you are someone who thinks with style you can cover up substance, that's not true. Please never prioritize style over substance. Please never prioritize. Have you say something over what you say? Because end of the day, what you say, the substance is what matters. That doesn't mean that you should not have an impressive style of speaking. If you can have that, that is like a cherry on the cake. It's just an additional quality that will help you. If you are a charismatic speaker, you're just blessed to be happy with that. But not all of us can be charismatic. So content is what we need to focus on to speak effectively. So the first thing was to feel confident, act confident. The second thing, be honest, be open. And the third is very, very important. We most often forget this. Be clear, be concise. As I was preparing for the stock, I was wondering, how can I retain the attention of my audience for at least 40 to 45 minutes? Because our attention span is less than half of that. Studies show that it lasts somewhere between 20 seconds and eight minutes. So imagine the session is going to be five times that. How do I have my audience in my grips? That I can do only with clarity and concise. So if I'm going to be someone who is very birdie, someone who is being very verbose in nature, someone who is blabbering or rambling, it's not going to help my case. I should overcome my tendency to use a lot of words, high sounding words, jargons, because they are not going to help my audience. It's not that you're underestimating the knowledge of your audience, but it is always better to keep it simple. So one major pitfall in the 21st century, in the digital world that we live in, in the path to clarity and conciseness is PPTs, slides. I truly wanted to emphasize on this. We believe that a lot of PPT, a lot of slides impressively done will make an impact. I'm so sorry to burst that bubble. It is not going to make an impact. People are not going to remember your slides. They are going to remember you, you the person, the presenter, not the presentation. So you have to understand that too much of PPTs, too many PPTs is going to be a distractor. It is going to distract the audience from listening to you and rather focusing on the presentation. So secondly, bombarding a hundred and odd slides is not going to make an impact. It's going to do the opposite of that. It is going to be so boring. It is going to be such a deterrent in the path to understanding. If you say everything you wish to say in the PPT, the audience don't need a presenter anymore. All they need is to get their hands on the PPT. Imagine you are a business person and you are making a presentation. Business people do this a lot. They make fancy slides and they presented to meetings with these scraps and pie diagrams and all these things. But if you are not going to make an impact, the presentation is going to fall flat. And most often when you are pitching an idea, it is not the group that you are pitching to that determines the outcome of that presentation. That is that discussion. Rather, it will be one person from that group who takes it to another group who could be the board of directors, who could be the elite within an organization who make important decisions. So in that case, the person who goes to the other meeting should be able to remember what you said. They should be able to recollect what you said and that can happen only when there was clarity in your presentation, only when your presentation was concise to the points direct. So verbal beandering is not going to help at all when it comes to impact. So how does one achieve clarity? How does one achieve conciseness? There are two things that we need to do for this. The first is ask yourself what you want to say. I know this sounds very simple. What you want to say to the audience. It can be a one-to-one conversation or it can be a one-to-many conversation, but you always need to have a clarity on what you want to say. But what I say now is applicable more to professional environments than personal environments because I'm going to talk about mind mapping. How does mind mapping help? When we start brainstorming something, particularly in the case of a presentation that we want to make, or if you are a lawyer, you want to go to the court and make your case. If you're a student, you want to go for a Viva. If you're a teacher, you want to give a seminar on something. We always start with brainstorming. So at the level of brainstorming, if you're going to do mind mapping, it is of great help because when we have this large pool of ideas in the beginning, we need to narrow it down to a small pool of ideas. For instance, if you are someone who wants to do PhD, your project supervisor or your project guide might tell you, go find the topic and then we will start a topic. And there are millions of topics in this world. You might, as a researcher, think, okay, that's not too hard. Just one topic, I can do that. And you might tell yourself that it's very easy to find the topic. But then you start the process and you understand it's not as easy as you thought of it to be. Very challenging because prioritizing and arriving at what you want is very difficult. You'll be spoiled for choices. Similarly, when you are in the ideation process, you will have a lot of ideas in your minds. So if you want to speak effectively, you have to narrow it down to a small pool of ideas that will work, ideas that will make an impact. So mind mapping can be a wonderful tool in that regard. It helps you put your ideas in a coherent fashion. Most often when we speak in a presentation like this or any professional level it could be, what is very important is we need to have a narrative when we speak. By narrative, it doesn't mean a story. Most often people think narrative means a story. It's not a story. It's that coherence that connectedness your ideas have where one leads to another and there is a flow of thoughts. It's not like random ideas are put together. It's not haphazard. It's not just incoherent things patched up. It should not be like that. There need to be a flow of ideas. There need to be what we call coherence and that can come to us only then as a speaker when we have clarity over what we want to say. So that is very, very important and then that is done half the job is done. Your communication is going to be very effective. It is going to be very impactful. But there's another step to this, which is what do you want the audience to take away from that conversation to take away from that presentation to take away from that discussion. That is very important. So whatever you have said should reach the audience in a very clear manner because in a webinar like this, maybe we could have a questioning session in the end that lasts for five to 10 minutes. But there's not much space for me to clarify myself is if I have uttered something in a confusing manner if I lacked clarity. So it does not much space for me to restate things or re-emphasize things. In that case, I have to get it right the first time. That's very, very important. At least you have to make an effort. Most often we may not achieve it, but making an effort truly matters and that can leave some kind of an impact on the audience. So I would like to quote the words of Albert Einstein. If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. So this might sound very cliched again, but imagine as a student, if your teacher had explained a difficult concept in difficult terms in a high sounding language, reading from the book What is There, you might not have understood it. But if it were a good teacher, she would have simplified it for you. She would have restated the same idea with an analogy, with an anecdote or with an illustration that makes you understand it so well. That aha moment you have where you see that your students have understood something so well gives you so much of joy, that immense joy that we have when our colleagues at work understand what we say. That can happen only when there is this conciseness and clarity, and that can happen only with simplicity. So please don't try to show off your knowledge. Please don't try too hard to make an impression on people. Use high sounding words, throw jargons and have this, you know, sanctimonious attitude at all times. That's not going to help you at all. We don't like people like that. We only like people who put things in simple terms, because that means that person has understood it really well. If you can make a child understand what you're saying, then you are a good communicator. If you can't do that, then you still need to work on your communication skills. So as I already mentioned, this is a very important strategy that you need to have, which is to be clear, to be concise. So I have mentioned three strategies for speaking effectively. The first, as I already mentioned, is to feel confident, act confident, be open, be honest, be clear and be concise. There's a fourth point which I would like to add. It's not more a point, but what should I say? It's a trait that we need to have in us, a quality that we need to possess to be an effective communicator. Be kind, be empathetic. Yes, it's very, very important in the present world in which we live. We live in a world where everyone is opinionated. Everyone has polarized views on things. We may not agree with everyone we come across, we work with, we live with, but that does not mean that we can't see their side of things. So to engage in a conversation, you don't have to agree with the other person. All you have to do is accept that the other person has a different view than yours. If you can do that and tell the other person straight to his or her face, I don't agree with you. But I understand that you have a reason to believe what you believe that is going to make a lasting impact. So there are times when my students differ in their views from me. They have different perspectives which they voice out in class. I believe it is important to have as many voices as possible as each one perceives the world with their own stock of experiences and their own stock of knowledge. So we should be open to accommodate as many views as different from ours. Respect people's differences, whether it work place or within your own family. Make the people who engage with you in conversations feel heard, feel visible, feel valued, and I can promise you it will leave a lasting impact on them than all the other things that I said earlier. Like active listening and speaking effectively. More than all of that, one thing that is going to make a lasting impact on people is being kind and being empathetic. You can have different views. For instance, I consider myself a feminist and I've always been very proud to wear that as a badge. Wherever I go, I always talk about why I am a feminist and why I believe in feminism. A lot of my students who come from small towns, who come from families where there is a very strong patriarch, who come from families where they have never had the space to voice out their feelings. They ask me, isn't that a very elitist concept, ma'am? You talk about feminism, you talk about all these ideas, but we don't even have the space to express to our parents what we want to learn, what we want to study. Most often they come to me saying that they chose literature because it was the father's choice or the mother's choice or there was some pressure from someone which led them to choosing literature. So in that case, I can't argue with them why I am a feminist. Rather, I need to side with them and make them understand why it is important presently given the scenario in which they find themselves for the need for feminists. So if you have the time, please watch Chimamanda Adichie's The Danger of a Single Story. It is a tech talk that is so popular that skyrocketed Adichie to a very popular figure. And she is one of the impressive speakers that we have in the present day world. There's also another speech which was very popular, which also got turned into a book called We Should All Be Feminists. I would emphasize that you watch both of these videos because they are hugely beneficial. So I'm putting it in the chat box, the title of the video, The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Adichie. She is an Nigerian writer, a writer that I greatly value and cherish. So with that I would like to wrap up my session. As I already mentioned, I always welcome opposing views. I always welcome views that are different from mine. So if you have questions or if you want to disagree with me on something, please feel free to do that. And I feel that this will be a space for us to widen our perspectives and widen our knowledge. Thank you so much for this opportunity. Like I said to the audience first that your earlier session was so eliminating to the mindset that I thought that we should call upon Urusha and that's why I was pushing a cross with Mr. Srinivas Raghavan who was the connecting, you can say the bridge point to connect us. So if I could have understood yours is that you say that to understand for a better communication, there has to be clarity, better communication skills. It has to be concise. It has to be crisp. But the manner in which you were speaking about, I just wanted to know that we need a lot of reading. There's a new concept what we have started developing of mind mapping. You also figured that point that they should be mind mapping. How do you say that mind mapping can actually help? Because two processes that I've understood is that one is funneling of the thought processes. And mind mapping are two distinct and distinguishable features or overlapping. And how do you develop that? So yeah, that's a wonderful question, sir. As I already mentioned, I believe mind mapping needs to funneling of idea that inverted pyramid that we talked so much about where there's a large pool of ideas and narrowing it down to a small pool of ideas or one idea that inverted pyramid that we so much talk about, that can happen through mind mapping because when we mind map, we are just pouring all the thoughts that we have in our mind into the map. There needs to be no coherence in that. I would say that mind map in any creative way that you want to. But once the map is done, you see there is a connection. That is this narrative. Your eyes can perceive it. So the moment your eyes can perceive it, you start reorganizing the ideas. So you branch them out. So there is this large, you know, it's like a tree. So you have this trunk, and then the ideas branch out and there are other small, like a river like tributaries, and you have all of this. And that's where this funneling happens. And once that happens, you can chop off a few branches and keep the trunk or retain the whole of it. If it is going to be a very complicated argument that you want to present. But that conciseness and clarity that I emphasized so much on can come to us only when we organize our ideas. So I would suggest that you should never start with organizing your ideas. You should just let your ideas take their own course. Let them flow. Like in literature, we say you have to keep your creative juices running, you know, just let it pour. It can be a downpour sometimes, like just ideas bombarded, but that's good, which means now you have the option to choose. Then by, you know, narrowing it down to a small pool of ideas, we can arrive at what is best, whatever best we have to offer. For instance, by preparing for this talk, I just randomly read a lot of things, randomly watch a lot of videos, randomly read a lot of journal articles, no idea in my mind. But like a sponge, you absorb everything. And at the end of it, you know what you want, you arrive at the clarity. And after you arrive at the clarity, you start making drafts. So it's like the first draft, which is the worst of all, and then the second, the third, the fourth, and it goes on until you arrive at a point where you're fully confident. But one thing that I have noticed as a teacher is no matter how many drafting you do, how much of notes you take, once you go to the class, you ditch the notes and you say what you want to say. Because as a teacher, there is this spur of the moment magic that happens. And that is what makes teaching a very exciting profession. Like you rightly said, I believe that the more you absorb, it's like a sponge. And one of my seniors used to say that you absorb, it is like the water of a sponge. Immediately you press upon, it goes in the right direction wherever you want to put it up. So it doesn't flow, the sponge doesn't go straight home. And before we part for the day, it's actually very nicely put across that your session should be concise, precise and in size to actually make an impactful impression. And that's what we have taken the things forward for today. And thank you for sharing your knowledge and we would be always indebted if you keep on sharing your knowledge. We have been told that you have holidays and we would like to take benefit of their until analysts, you are going across. I've received few messages also saying that you should bring Rousha Ma'am again, once and again. And thank you for sharing your knowledge. And tomorrow, our friends do join us. We have Mr. Ajay Jawad, who is a senior mediator, as well as a social speaker. He will take us on the art of negotiation. Though he specializes in mediation, but I had requested him that negotiation will not be necessarily only for the lawyers, judges and the clients as such. If we can learn the art of negotiation, that they say, if you learn the art of negotiation, you also learn the art of navigating. And once you learn the art of navigating, you can make things forward. And that's what the mind mapping is. And thank you friends for joining us and pushing us to bring best of the things. Saurabh Sharma is asking. Saurabh tomorrow, the time is 6.30pm. It's not the usual time. It's 30 minutes past because he was quite busy. But as we have speakers who have their insights that burning desire to put it back to the society, that helps us to connect. Thank you everyone. Stay safe. Stay safe.