# Good Verbal Communication Skills: The Nine Habits That Do the Work Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/good-verbal-communication-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/good-verbal-communication-skills.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Good verbal communication skills are nine specific habits, not a personality. What each one looks like at work, what failure looks like, and which to fix first. ## Key facts - Title: Good Verbal Communication Skills: The Nine Habits That Do the Work - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Building Confidence, Influence - Primary keyword: good verbal communication skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/good-verbal-communication-skills/ ## What this page covers - Good verbal communication skills are nine specific habits, not a personality. What each one looks like at work, what failure looks like, and which to fix first. - Practical guidance for good verbal communication skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation Most people looking this up have a specific moment in mind: a meeting where you said something perfectly reasonable and could tell from the faces that it had not landed. Good verbal communication skills are a set of nine specific habits — saying your main point first, keeping it brief, using plain language, listening actively, asking open questions, controlling your tone, pausing before you speak, sharing the airtime, and letting your body language agree with your words. None of them is a personality trait. The list is not the hard part. Almost every article on the subject carries roughly the same one. What none of them tell you is which of the nine is yours. ## The nine habits behind good verbal communication skills Search this term and the same components come back from nearly every source — Indeed, Forage, BetterUp, SkillsYouNeed and the rest name the same set in nearly the same words. That agreement is useful, because it means you are not choosing between competing theories about what good looks like. It also explains the frustration. You can read three of those articles, recite the list afterward, and still have no idea what to do differently in tomorrow's meeting. So read the nine below looking for the one or two that sting, not for coverage. ### 1. Say your main point first Open with the conclusion or the request, then supply the reasoning that got you there. The common failure is the reverse: narrating the process, building context, and arriving at the point last, by which time the listener has either guessed it or stopped following. This is the habit the standard lists most often skip — they say "be clear" without specifying where in the sentence the clarity belongs. It is also the cheapest one to adopt, because it reorders what you already know rather than asking you to learn anything new. A listener who has your point can follow any amount of detail. One who doesn't is just waiting. ### 2. Keep it short on purpose Consolidate a message into its core meaning before you deliver it. Indeed's career guidance frames brevity as a matter of attention rather than manners: short messages hold it, rambling loses it. This is the habit that runs hardest against early-career instinct, because when you are new, length feels like proof that you did the work. It usually reads as the opposite. A long answer to a short question signals uncertainty — that you are still deciding what you think while you talk. Saying less, and stopping cleanly, tends to sound more competent than saying everything you know. ### 3. Use plain language, not professional language Clarity comes from simple words, no jargon, and a message shaped around what this particular listener needs to know. The trap is treating "sounding professional" as a matter of vocabulary and reaching for formality, acronyms, and internal shorthand to signal that you belong. Sources consistently tie clarity to the listener's comprehension rather than the speaker's word choice, which quietly makes it a test you cannot score yourself. The practical version: drop team jargon the moment you step outside the team that uses it, and if you would not use the word explaining your job to a friend, you probably do not need it in the meeting. ### 4. Listen actively, not politely Most people treat listening as the thing they do while waiting to talk. SkillsYouNeed puts it the other way around — listening to others is arguably more important than speaking well, on the grounds that you cannot say anything useful to someone you have not understood. The reassuring part is that this is a procedure, not a disposition. The NCBI StatPearls chapter on active listening, written for clinicians, describes it as trainable technique: give full attention, use short verbal encouragers, reflect back what the person actually said, and summarize at the end to confirm you got it right. That last step does double duty, because it also stops you repeating a point out of doubt that it landed. ### 5. Ask questions that open the conversation Open-ended questions keep a conversation moving; clarifying questions confirm you understood the request before you spend two days acting on the wrong version of it. Both demonstrate comprehension rather than performing it. There is a second use worth knowing if speaking up is hard for you: a question is a complete contribution that carries far less exposure than a claim. You are not defending a position, you are moving the discussion forward, and it counts as having spoken. For anyone building up to saying more in meetings, it is the lowest-cost place to start. ### 6. Control your tone How you say something can add force to your message or undermine it entirely — SkillsYouNeed is direct about this, noting that a friendly, confident tone makes listeners more receptive before they have weighed a single word. Tone is also the habit that carries furthest into difficult moments. An even tone paired with calm body language raises the chance of actually resolving a tense exchange, which turns tone from a delivery detail into something you can use during a disagreement. The version that matters at work is not warmth on demand. It is noticing when your voice has tightened or sharpened, and deliberately not matching the temperature in the room. ### 7. Pause before you speak Take a beat before answering. Indeed's guidance names the mechanism plainly: the pause gives your brain time to organize your thoughts, which is what stops the rambling and the off-topic detour before they start. Measured against effort, this is the highest-return habit in the list. It costs a second of silence, requires no preparation, no rehearsal and nobody's permission, and you can start using it in your next conversation. The only obstacle is that two seconds of silence feels much longer to you than it does to anyone else in the room, where it registers as thinking. ### 8. Share the airtime Let people finish. Give them your full attention while they are getting their point out, and meet the idea itself rather than the version of it you assumed was coming. This is the only entry in the whole list that asks you to do less rather than more, which is exactly why it is the one most often skipped — every other habit rewards effort, and this one rewards restraint. If you already talk easily, the other eight will feel like refinements and this one will feel like a real cost. That is a reliable sign it is the one to work on. ### 9. Let your body language agree with your words Speech does not travel on its own; it arrives bundled with your posture, expression and eye contact, and the listener reads all of it together. What makes this actionable is that the common failures are specific and named — tapping a foot, crossed arms, checking the time, letting your eyes wander around the room. None of those change a word you say, but they tell the listener you would rather be elsewhere, and once someone believes that, the content stops being weighed on its merits. Treat this as a short list of things to stop doing rather than a posture to adopt. Nine habits, and almost nobody is weak at all nine. That is the reason a settled list is still not enough on its own: without knowing which one or two are costing you, it is entirely possible to spend six months polishing a habit you already had. A quick read on [which ones are actually yours](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) is a better starting point than a general resolve to communicate better — and every one of the nine is a behavior, which means whichever one it is, it is changeable. ## The skills that make these habits stick Read the nine together and something uneven shows up. A few are pure technique — reorder the sentence, drop the jargon, cut the length — and you could adopt them tomorrow by deciding to. Others ask for something that is not technique at all: staying quiet when you want to fill the silence, asking a question in a room where you have not spoken yet, holding an even tone when the exchange has turned. That is where these habits usually break down, and it is why the difficulty tends to trace back to three underlying skills rather than to speech itself. **Communication** covers the habits themselves, and it is more specific than the word suggests. Say the main point first. Be brief. Be direct. Adapt to how the person in front of you takes in information, and want to understand them before you want to be understood. It also covers the live moments that no list of tips prepares you for — disagreeing without it turning personal, giving feedback, handling someone who has arrived angry — which are precisely the conversations where the nine habits either hold or collapse. **Building Confidence** is what determines whether you use any of them under pressure. It is built by doing, not by feeling ready first: take on a slightly harder version of the thing, collect the evidence that you managed it, and repeat. Speaking once in a small meeting is what makes speaking twice possible. The discomfort does not have to disappear before you start — the working approach is to accept it, stay a little outside your comfort zone rather than far outside it, and treat a clumsy attempt as information rather than a verdict on you. **Influence** is the difference between being understood and being listened to. It rests on knowing what the situation looks like from the other person's side, keeping the case simple, using a concrete example instead of an abstraction, presenting the drawbacks honestly rather than only the upside, hearing an objection all the way out before you answer it, and following up afterward. None of that is a trick of wording. It is what makes a clear point turn into a decision. Worth checking before you pick something to practice: the free Job Skills Test gives you [a read across all three](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), not communication alone — they sit inside a set of twelve work skills the framework treats as learnable. The one holding your speaking back is frequently not the one you would have named. You will already do several of the nine without thinking about it, in the conversations where you feel comfortable. Most people do. The gap is rarely between you and some effortlessly articulate colleague; it is between how you speak when you are prepared and how you speak when you are caught off guard. That gap closes with practice rather than temperament. Nothing here asks you to become louder or quicker than you are — a quiet, unhurried speaker who does these nine things reliably is a good communicator by any reasonable measure. And it is not a skill you grow out of needing. The more people you have to work through rather than around, the more of your effect depends on what happens in a room while you are talking. You have just read nine descriptions of how you speak, and you almost certainly recognized yourself in one or two of them. That noticing is the step most people skip. What is left is deciding which one to work on. ## Find out which of the nine is yours You do not have to commit to anything today beyond looking. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of the twelve work skills sitting behind everything above — communication, confidence and influence among them — and it shows you where each of yours currently stands, so you get a starting point rather than another list to work through. You take it on your own, and nobody is listening. **[Take the skills test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, about 7 minutes, and you see your results the moment you finish.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Good verbal communication skills are nine specific habits, not a personality. What each one looks like at work, what failure looks like, and which to fix first. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Building Confidence, Influence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/good-verbal-communication-skills/ Preferred summary: "Good verbal communication skills are nine specific habits, not a personality. What each one looks like at work, what failure looks like, and which to fix first." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.