Introduction to effective communication

• Importance of verbal communication
• Non verbal communication is also an integral part of expressing yourself

The Beginning

Communication is an essential process which helps us to express our feelings and without communication, we will not be able to share our knowledge and experiences with other people. There are different parts of communication like speaking, listening, gestures, and body language while each one of these is important to make communication effective.

When you can master these all parts then, you can say that you have learned the art of effective communication. There are two types of communication and you can call these two types as verbal and no-verbal communication. Both of these are important in a way that they complete each other.

Importance of verbal communication

There are different attributes of verbal communication like words, language, voice and others. When a child is born, he has vocal cards and as he grows he learns to control those vocal cords and to speak words. Some words are just natural gestures as crying or laughing but with the time, he learns to speak language.

Words alone have no meaning instead people give meaning to words by arranging them in different ways. Through speaking we always try to make things clear but this does not happen always. When we think that something is important to us, we also believe that this thing is equally important to others as well but it is not like that.

You can experience lots of problems in speaking and only way to get hold of all those problems is through experience. Speaking has basically two areas which are interpersonal speaking and public speaking. More common is interpersonal speaking because we communicate mostly one to one and in order to do that effectively, you need to learn people and read people correctly.

Manners matter most in interpersonal speaking and you should speak in a manner that the person in front should not be offended in anyway. Public speaking is another area which you can improve by just observing some good speakers. Time has shown that some people are always good public speakers while others cannot be very good public speakers.

Non verbal communication is also an integral part of expressing yourself

Nonverbal communication is also an integral part of communication and in fact in some cases, it can be more important than verbal communication. Situations can come where words will not let you to explain things properly and in those situations, non-verbal communication comes into play.

There are different parts of non-verbal communication like artifacts, haptic, chronemics and other similar things. Artifacts are the most important things which include your clothing, dressing style, jewelry and other accessories which become part of your personality.

According to most of the experts, your wardrobe is the most important object in haptic and it can always send the impact of your real personality. People can be often judged from their clothing style. Similarly, you can get an idea of the feelings from haptic as well.

The way you touch something or someone can send a right or wrong impression which means you should be very careful while touching and expressing your feelings because it may happen that you have a positive intention but your touching depicts a negative gesture.

Importance of effective communication

There is a phrase from British propaganda in WWII that states “A careless talk costs lives.” This may sound little over dramatic but the fact is if you are unable to convey your message properly or you are unable to express your message properly then, in both of these situations, you are going to bear the loss.

Now, this loss can be of life, of property, of money or any other type. Ineffective and improper communication will bring out different problems in our personal as well as social lives. To make communication more and more effective, you need to learn that there should be a harmony of thoughts between the sender and receiver.

Why it matters

If sender is conveying the message with a different mind frame while receiver is sitting in a different mind frame then, communication failure will occur and the outcome of this communication will not be very useful.

Attitude improvement is another way to make your communication more effective and more concrete because a positive attitude can make your whole process of communication positive while a negative gesture can send a wrong signal in your communication and people will start to take it negatively. Communication skills have a very deep importance in any business environment and effective or ineffective communication can make organizations progressive or declined respectively.

You can never say that communication has become ideal in some organization just because some of the language glitches are fixed instead communication is a thing which always needs your attention and constant maintenance and improvement. While communicating at interpersonal level, you should make sure that the meaning of your discussion is properly understood by the listener. Just saying “do you know what I mean” in the end will not be sufficient.

Damage of ineffective communication

You can always make a map that which damages and advantages you can get from ineffective and effective communication. This will not take that long to know that ineffective communication can give you lots of losses in terms of your work, time, productivity, progress and other similar things.

If you have mis-communicated with your boss over a certain report then, you will have to do that report from scratch and it will cost you both time and work and in most of the cases ineffective communication will cause you embarrassment.

The best approach is to identify miscommunication as soon as possible because sooner you identify sooner you can fix it. Ineffective communication will also cause you lots of extra stress and tension because when you miss some work due to ineffective communication then, your boss will be angry with you and it may happen that some of your colleague also gets disturbed with that effort.

So it can disturb the whole working environment for you. In order to avoid all of the above problems, you must communicate effectively and if you are having problems in effective communication then, you must keep reading and in coming chapters I am going to tell you the exact ways of improving your communication.

Excerpted from the book Effective Communication .

This excerpt has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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