Three Top Skills of any Successful Communicator

If you were asked to list what you thought were the top three skills of any "successful" writer or speaker, what would be your answer? I'm reasonably sure we could come up a variety of interesting replies. Some example could perhaps include:

• A superb command of language both spoken and written.
• An exceptional ability to tell great stories.
• To entertain in words and speech.
• To be a nice person and genuinely interested in others.
• To contribute to the world's sum total supply of knowledge.
• To teach and inform.

All perfectly valid answers of traits that help writers, speakers and website content providers hone their craft to the best of their ability. However, I think there is another, higher level thought process going on that we should also consider.The additional suggestions I'm listing below might not be quite what you imagine. Consider the three additional and perhaps initially unforeseen traits the could come to mind:

• Passion.
• Focus.
• Proactive intelligent persistence.

Yet of our three perhaps unusual attributes above, only one "keeps us going" when either of the others have given up: persistence. Yet our definition of "proactive intelligent persistence" is something more as discussed below.

More often than not, persistence really is the writer or speaker's greatest single skill, for through the application of a certain kind of persistence, no obstacle is ever big enough to prevent you from achieving your goals.

That same statement could also be said of many other amazing human endeavors. In fact, there's only ever one outcome that can defeat persistence - simply giving up.

With persistence, you can achieve all of the goals above and much more, if you wish.

The ability to persist - especially when events don't seem to be going our way, is also a valuable addition to our toolkit of life coping strategies, or for any career or vocation, which can help see you through the storms of life and not just your writing or speaking low points.

What is Proactive Intelligent Persistence?

Now here's the most important argument of this article. The kind of persistence I'm suggesting here is not the practice of just doing the same thing repeatedly until you secure the result you want - whatever the external conditions might be telling you. No, rather, I'm suggesting that you develop the ability to be flexible while keeping on course and not be fazed by setbacks - here is the intelligent proactive element at work.

If feedback, conditions, testing, results or measurements suggest to you that your current approach is flawed, then changing or adapting your methods is not giving up - it's proactive intelligent persistence working at its best.

Even the stonemason who's primary goal is to split the large rock seems to be repeatedly doing the same thing. However, when we look a little closer we can see that our skillful craftsman varies the blow; strikes at different angles and applies varying strikes of different pressure and intensity. The key point here is that when the rock eventually splits, the final blow was itself not the sole cause of the rock breaking, only one component of many that went into achieving the desired result. In truth, both the last strike and the sum of all that went before is the real and only reason the rock split. So it is with our writing, speaking and website development success.

Intelligent proactive persistent energy is a formidable power that is available to you at any time in your life. Use it!

In the same way, each stage of your writing or speaking is a step toward bigger and better things.

Persist intelligently - always!