Communication Skills

Well I have just finished a short course on "Effective Interpersonal Skills". Basically it's a cause that teaches you how to improve your interpersonal skills and I find it quite useful(Most people will need to improve their interpersonal skills somehow) although I feel that the theory are a bit crap lah haha..Anyway as part of the course, I have to read up on a book titled "Reaching Out Interpersonal Effectiveness and Self Acutalisation". Some of the extracts that I want to share from the book:

What is Communications? Communications, simply put it is the exchange of message to satisfy some personal needs. To live is to communicate, all living things communicate by their own means unique to them. Thus the importance of communications cannot be over emphasized?
Communications between 2 person can be viewed as consisting of 7 basic elements:

1)Intentions of the sender
2)Encoding of the message, How the sender want encode their feelings, ideas into the
message
3)Sending the message, How the sender want to deliver the message
4)Channel
5)Decoding of the message by the reciever, how the reciever percieve the sender's
message
6)Internal Response of the reciever
7)Noise, surroundtings or other sources disrupting the message

Not all the time, the communication process is effective i.e the reciever understands all that the sender wants to send. Misunderstandings can arises from a number of factors:
1)Lack of trust, suspicious of the sender
2)Evaluative and Judgemental, keep telling what the reciever ought to do.
3)Emotional/Social sources of noise, not listening
4)Underlying meaning of the message is not recognised
5)Intentions of the sender is not always clear


Tips to effective Communications:

1)Take ownership, use "I" in messages don't speak for others
2)Be descriptive not evualutative, dun judge the sender
3)Understand other people's perspective, what you say may mean another thing to them
4)Use relationship statements (statements that has ideals to improve relationship)
5)Ensure 2 way communications


*Hope readers benefited from this post hehe