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Why is Effective Communication Skills important to me?
11:54 PM @
Thursday, August 19, 2010
@ Elgin First and foremost, welcome all to my blog. Thank you for visiting this page. I hope that you enjoy reading here, and feel free to drop a comment anytime!
It never fails to amaze me that when two or more people come together, conversations are started almost automatically to break the atmosphere of awkwardness, although it may not always be successful. For myself, I am not the kind of person who likes to talk much, but I do try to make the effort to break down the invisible wall of silence. I would not consider myself a skillful person who gets the conversation going, and thus I'm always interested in learning to improve my communication skills.
In my opinion, everyone has an inner need of communication, to be heard and understood by someone else, but is often met with some form of resistance (which I call it an invisible wall) before the first word has been spoken. This is because of the fear of creating a bad impression or saying the wrong things that might work against us, so we prefer to keep silent at times instead of speaking up. Nevertheless, there is no hard and fast rule when it comes to communication, as each and every scenario is unique, especially the person you are talking to at a specific time is unique.
When I was thinking on this topic on communication, an interesting thought struck my mind. Have anyone looked at communication at this perspective, that we are communicating at all times? Of course verbal interactions are also communication, but other than that, we are also conveying a message to the people in our surroundings. Let me explain using a few examples: if you are walking down a busy street filled with people walking by you, ain't you actually conveying a message "We do not know each other, let us continue walking and not stop each other". How about when we are sleeping? Ain't we actually telling the people around us "I'm tired and need some rest." This concept may sound quite abstract and possibly a little far-fetched to some, but we can all agree that non-verbal actions and interactions are also part of communication that we all need to be aware of. Of course, too much self-conscious is never good either, but that would be a whole different topic altogether.
Being quite a reserved and quiet person that I consider myself as, I rarely start a conversation unless I feel a need to. The reason for this could be attributed to my past experiences of being misunderstood, in which I have made a point of observing interpersonal interactions between other people (as well as myself) and understanding how I can improve my own personal communicative skills to prevent any possible misunderstandings or confusions. Often a person of few words can create ambiguity in conversations that I look forward to reduce such situations.
Not just family and friends, but to colleagues and other people who we have a professional relationship with, I feel effective communication skills are important to all. I may exaggerate, but often one misunderstanding could lead to another and eventually a series of misunderstanding that might snowball into a conflict. I speak this from my personal experience, as I was involved in misunderstanding due to miscommunication with a friend which eventually led to a heated argument one day. Although we did have a good clarification session soon after, the damaged relationship between us took what seems like eons to recover.
As human beings, relationship takes up a major part of our lives, and each of us place a certain value on it. One of the criteria of having a good relationship with another person is having effective communication, where both sides understand what the other person is conveying. It is only through mutual understandings that good friendship are forged and developed. I would definitely take the effort to improve my communication skills, so that I'm able to build good relationships with others, after all no man is an island.
One last note that I would like to make at the end of this, is that I'm looking forward to the rest of this module course (ES2007S) that I'm currently taking, so as I can better understand and improve my personal communication skills. Despite the heavy workload, I feel putting in the effort in this course would definitely have an even greater pay-off in future.
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