High performance communication is necessary to ensure that when people speak, their voices will rise above the ceaseless chatter and infinite information people will be bombarded with each day. There are three requirements necessary to achieve high performance communication:
1. A clear strategy: Speakers must develop a clear strategy for their presentations based on the desired outcome of the speeches.
2. Practice: As with any skill, mastering high performance communication requires practice. Meyers and Nix provide a self-assessment to help identify which areas speakers need to improve upon as well as a tool to help interpret their scores on the self-assessment.
3. Feedback: When communicating, the only thing that counts is the listener’s experience. Therefore it is essential that speakers elicit feedback from others. Understanding what the audience is experiencing is the only way speakers can fine-tune and improve their messages. The authors provide a “Communication Feedback” form to help speakers easily capture the impressions from their audiences.
The three parts of high performance communication that need to be mastered are: content, delivery, and state.