Communication: Awareness
Understand what communication means, what's possible, and where you stand. About 15 minutes.
Communication is the medium through which almost everything in your life happens. Every relationship, every collaboration, every negotiation, and every conflict runs on it. Improving how you communicate has an unusually broad impact because it touches so many domains at once.
The evidence for its importance is consistent across contexts. Employers rank communication as the most sought-after skill in job candidates across industries. People with strong interpersonal skills experience less loneliness and build deeper social networks. An estimated 86% of workplace failures are attributed to poor communication or collaboration.
Communication is also unusually trainable. Unlike personality traits, which are relatively stable, specific communication skills – listening, structuring arguments, managing conflict, reading a room – respond well to deliberate practice. Small improvements compound quickly because you use these skills dozens of times a day.
Roughly 75% of people experience public speaking anxiety, and fewer than 5% communicate assertively in everyday situations. This means that even moderate competence puts you well above the median.
People develop their communication for different reasons. This site scores every communication intervention across four core values. Later, you'll set your own weighting across these values, and the site will rank interventions by how well they deliver on the things you actually care about.
Influence
The ability to persuade others, drive decisions, and create change through your communication. People who lean towards this value focus on strategic messaging, understanding what motivates different audiences, and developing the credibility and presence needed to shape outcomes.
Connection
Building genuine relationships, emotional intimacy, and mutual understanding through communication. People who lean towards this value focus on listening deeply, sharing vulnerably, and creating the emotional safety that allows relationships to flourish over time.
Performance
Excelling in high-stakes or formal communication situations – public speaking, presentations, job interviews, media appearances. People who lean towards this value develop skills specifically for moments when communication performance directly impacts important outcomes.
Conflict Navigation
Handling disagreements, difficult conversations, and interpersonal tensions constructively while maintaining relationships. People who lean towards this value become comfortable with necessary tension and develop frameworks for working through differences without damaging bonds.
The Top 0.1% band represents roughly 1 in 1,000 people. To give you a sense of what that looks like for each communication value:
William Ury co-founded the Harvard Program on Negotiation and co-authored Getting to Yes, one of the most widely read books on negotiation. He has mediated conflicts between corporations, governments, and ethnic groups on five continents, and his frameworks for principled negotiation have shaped how millions of people approach persuasion and deal-making.
Terry Gross has hosted Fresh Air on NPR since 1975, conducting thousands of interviews across nearly five decades. She is widely regarded as one of the most skilled interviewers alive – guests routinely disclose things to her they have never shared publicly, citing her deep listening and genuine curiosity as the reason.
Hans Rosling was a Swedish physician and statistician whose TED talks have been viewed over 35 million times. He used animated data visualisations and physical props to make global health statistics compelling and memorable. His presentations consistently changed audience beliefs about world poverty and development – measurably, as he tested audiences before and after. He maintained this level of public communication for over a decade until his death in 2017.
George Mitchell chaired the Northern Ireland peace negotiations that produced the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, ending three decades of sectarian violence. Participants on all sides credited his patience, impartiality, and skill at finding common ground in situations where others saw none. He later served as US special envoy for Middle East peace.
Awareness means knowing your starting point. Answer each question below – some you might know off the top of your head, others might take a few minutes to reflect on.
Influence
Connection
Performance
Conflict Navigation
Your estimated position
Percentiles are estimates based on published population data on communication behaviours among adults. All items in this area are scored.
You now understand why communication matters, what different people get out of it, what's achievable, and where you currently stand. The final step is to set your personal value weightings and see which interventions are the best fit for you.
On the interventions page, adjust the sliders to reflect how much you care about influence, connection, performance, and conflict navigation. The table will re-rank interventions to match your priorities.
Awareness assessment complete
You've built your foundation in Communication. Your self-assessment and value weightings are saved.
View Your Interventions