Coffee Talk 2/18/09 "Commmmmmm"

Self expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment
Pearl S. Buck

At Coffee Talk this week we talked about Communication and also Communication Skills: what we need to have a better communication between others? Why we need to learn to listen? And also when to speak?

Effective communication is all about conveying your messages to other people clearly and unambiguously. It's also about receiving information that others are sending to you, with as little Distortion as possible.

Doing this involves effort from both the sender of the message and the receiver. And it's a process that can be fraught with error, with messages muddled by the sender, or misinterpreted by the recipient. When this isn't detected, it can cause tremendous confusion, wasted effort and missed opportunity.

In fact, communication is only successful when both the sender and the receiver understand the same information as a result of the communication. By successfully getting your message across, you convey your thoughts and ideas effectively. When not successful, the thoughts and ideas that you actually send do not necessarily reflect what you think, causing a communications breakdown and creating roadblocks that stand in the way of your goals.

Problems with communication can pop up!! At every stage of the communication process which consists of the sender, encoding, the channel, decoding, the receiver, feedback and the context.

To be an effective communicator and to get your point across without misunderstanding and confusion, your goal should be to lessen the frequency of problems at each stage of this process, with clear, concise, accurate, well planned communications.

To deliver your messages effectively, you must commit to breaking down the barriers that exist within each of these stages of the communication process.

Once we understand this, we need to work to understand our audiences culture, making sure we can converse and deliver our message to people of different backgrounds and cultures within our own conversational group.

And last but not less important we need to LEARN to Respect differences: dont judge people because of the way they speak.

Contributed by: Frangy Gomez a regular coffee talk attendee.