Manuela Fantini is the Italian entrepreneur, and founder of the ‘Girlboss & Co.’ community. Here we talked about communication skills with her in one of the interviews.
With your good communication skills, you attracted a lot of people in a short time. How did you specialise in this field?
A few years ago, I decided to invest some of my time and money to learn a simple and often very underestimated ability: communication. I entrusted the famous “Speak and Inspire” course by Lisa Nichols, one of the most requested motivational speakers in the world. She is terrific and you can get many of her books on Amazon. In my opinion, the ability to communicate is the most important skill to make a difference in every area of our life, but it is often underestimated or misunderstood. Even if we were born with strong communication skills, growing up, we may have found ourselves tied to give up our attitude, for fear of being judged, for self-doubt, for nervousness, for the effort to express ourselves freely and for a certain sense of privacy. Society has educated us since childhood to keep our thoughts to ourselves and that “it is best to not rock the boat”. So, it is easy to convince yourself that you are not a good communicator or that what you have to say doesn’t make a difference, but it does! I also thought for years that I was an introverted, private, too direct, and a bit of cynical person. Aspects of me that popped up very often when I came across a serious speech, making me feel unpleasant and always in the wrong, even when I wasn’t. It was very frustrating for me, feeling unable to express my thoughts effectively and even more, to never really feel free to do it. When I started to be aware of this, I worked a lot on it and it led me to connect in a really beautiful and deep way with the people who followed me.
What advice can you give to those who decide to improve in this respect?
Let people come into your life, tell them your story in a real and powerful way, arouse emotions, run away from conformism. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a tragic past or a memorable experience, the very act of sharing it and opening up will make you unforgettable. Take the risk of sharing something that has made you suffer but has taught you something, it will be a small gift to other people. It could be a simple moment of doubt, a time in your life when things weren’t great, show others what your problems were in detail and tell them how did you overcame them.
Communication serves to connect with people, not to reach goals, such as convincing, selling, or any other petty reason. Thinking about communication in this way will only make you fail. Don’t be focused on the result but on the path, believe in something, you have to fight for something, you have to
take sides. Because if you don’t fight for something you will end up with nothing.