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“10% of conflict is due to differences of opinion and 90% to the tone of voice” – Anonymous

Ever heard of the expression “it’s not what you say, but how you say it”? As you grow older and become involved in many spaces, interact with people of different levels of authority – how you address and approach people will become key to a successful relationship. Your tone is just one small component of communication; however, it should never be underestimated. Improving your tone can help create a positive environment, strengthen understanding and appreciation and result in better collaboration and teamwork.

We recently unpacked the importance of running for student leadership, a major part of leadership is the tone of your voice. The tone of voice is an integral part of communication and an effective tool in public speaking. When speaking with others, your tone clarifies and conveys meaning. Your tone can not only affect how people perceive you but also their willingness to listen to you – especially in professional settings.

Different tones for different occasions

The tone of voice in communication is defined as ‘the way a person speaks to someone’. It is how you use your voice to get your point across. If you don’t do it right, there is a risk of your point getting lost or misinterpreted.

How you address your friend will probably be very different from how you address a panel of interviewers or the Vice-Chancellor of your university. In other words, you address different audiences with different tones. This is often based on familiarity. The general rule of thumb, the less “familiar” you are with the said individual, the more formal and respectful your tone should be. You can train your tone to be apt for the correct setting. There are different tones and you need to know which tone befits which setting:

• Formal tone
• Informal tone
• Factual tone
• Directive tone
• Assertive tone
• Friendly tone
• Questioning tone
• Conversational tone
• Respectful tone
• Humorous tone

Are you speaking at a wedding or a funeral? An academic lecture or a plenary of plenary of protesting students? To your grandmother or legal officer? Each of these occasions has different norms for speaking, calling for you to operate in different modes – from formal to informal, from light to heavy, humorous to serious, conversational to highly practiced.

How to improve your tone

1. Think before you respond. Some of us are so quick to just respond without ever considering what we are saying and the choice of words we use. Have you ever found yourself saying to someone “I didn’t mean it like that”? If only you took a few minutes to carefully think about your choice of words and how they will be received, you might have the time to change your wording and be less offensive.
2. Listen to yourself. Have you ever recorded a meeting you were speaking in? If not, you should. Take this time to learn how you interact with and speak towards others. You might even find that your own tone surprises you.
3. Reflect. Most of the time, the reasoning behind a negative tone is a part of the bigger picture. If you are going through a tough time or are feeling a bit stressed, your tone can come off negatively without you even realizing it. Before you go into a space where you’ll be interacting with others, take some time to reflect on how you’re feeling. The last thing you want is to blow up on people who probably don’t deserve the negative tone.

It’s commonplace. Spending a significant amount of time searching for knowledge online and other sources. It’s become the way we learn, the way we connect with loved ones, and definitely the way we network and grow our careers.

This means that there’s a need to develop our skills in effectively managing the information that we collect from the sources that we frequent and trust. Otherwise, we run the risk of spinning our wheels and throwing our time into the (digital) abyss without ever getting anything back in the way of our personal development.

Then enters personal knowledge management.

And um, please don’t be put off by the word ‘management’. It’s a fun way to accelerate your learning and most importantly, organize all the valuable information and insight you gather from your research and reading. Plus, personal cloud storage has become easily available and most devices allow for easy filing, tagging, organizing, and searching.

Knowledge management, as a practice, is defined as the thoughtful process of defining, structuring, retaining, and using/sharing information.

And to effectively manage your library, build an easy-to-navigate system to store different types of material. You can categorise information into common themes. Example: the online links to informative videos, articles, online courses, etc. can be stored in one folder.

The benefits of managing knowledge

Retaining information (or, building a ‘back-up brain’)

The truth is that it’s difficult to remember all the things we see and learn daily. Important insights that could be saved and later combined with other pieces of information eventually get lost. An effective note-taking system allows you to build a habit of recording your thoughts and ideas and use them to build an expansive library that will become an ally to your learning.

Archiving notes makes for easy future reference

As a student, you spend a large sum of your time finding and reading, interpreting/summarizing and using information to learn and improve. And eventually, graduate through the course. With knowledge management, the idea is to properly organise what you learn, and place yourself in a position to leverage what you gain in the process.

Personal knowledge management combines (and helps improve) research skills, critical thinking, and evaluating communication. And in a learning environment, information literacy is important for academic success, and in the workplace too.

Increased self-awareness

On a ‘smaller scale’, keeping a diary could be considered a form of knowledge management. It involves thinking over again and writing down the details of your day or week, and processing emotions. It improves critical thinking skills and self-awareness. Over time, the diary becomes a tool through which you can look at yourself objectively. You are able to find useful (or, destructive) patterns within the diary entries and make necessary adjustments.

Keeping track of what we learn and think is also a useful way to explore language and improve communication skills.

The more we discover new information, archive it, and find ways to use it to learn and add value to others, the more we find connections between different ideas.

And it goes without saying that a personal knowledge management system cultivates a habit of lifelong learning.