Effective Communication Skills (Post #1)

Effective Communication Skills (Post #1)
Why developing effective communication skills is important

"Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"). This popular philosophical statement attributed to René Descartes is the foil to everything this course stands for – communication. No person is an island, and Man as a social creature HAS to communicate and have relationships with other beings. This sentence probably describes the very nature of communications, the relationship between “communicate” and “relationship”. Being capable of thought may allow us knowledge of self-existence, but without being able to express, give or interchange thoughts (whether literal thoughts, ideas, feelings or emotion) with others, it would really be a lonely place wouldn’t it?

Now, extremes aside, what about normal everyday communications? Everyone communicates in one way or another, but not everyone communicates effectively. Effectively, by dictionary.com, means “adequate to accomplish a purpose; producing the intended or expected result”. That is what many people lack today, producing the intended result when trying to communicate with others. Let me start with language barriers (although this course does not pertain to language barriers, I do think it gives excellent examples).
Just over the Chinese new year, my family went to a hawker centre for our reunion dinner. That was typical, as was the menu of Chinese foods: yu sheng( a fish salad cold dish), shark’s fin soup (mostly fake), steamed grouper fish (in soy sauce, delicious), roasted chicken (very typical), couple of vegetable dishes (obviously not important enough to make an impact on my memory), fried rice (love that stuff) and some dessert. Dinner went fairly normally, until we wanted the rice to be served earlier, so that we could have it with the dishes. My brother told the waitress to serve the “chow fan” (wok-fried rice usually with ingredients like roasted pork, green peas and lots of oil). The waitress gave a puzzled look before leaving with a confused expression. The fried rice soon came, looking nowhere near sufficient to feed the ten people of my party. Disgruntled murmurs broke out and we had to order white rice to go with the dishes. A little while later, a glutinous rice dish appeared. Since that was not on the menu, we called the waitress over. She looked even more bewildered and could only say that it was part of the menu. Note: the stall was run and manned by mainland Chinese. Halfway through the meal, a chicken dish arrived. However, it looked nothing like the roasted chicken we were expecting. It was more of a herbal chicken (which means it was braised in some sauce). We decided to spare the poor waitress and inquired of her manager instead (who spoke marginally better English I might add). It turned out that the misunderstanding was really quite simple. The menu was written in Chinese before being translated into English. The wrong dishes made perfect sense in mandarin, but the English translation was horrible. Since three generations of my family speak English as our first language, no one thought to check the mandarin characters, which were really quite different from the English translation. Communication? Yes. Effective? No.

This is why I think developing effective communication skills are essential. We can have the greatest ideas, but if we are not able to share them, we are better off just dreaming or imagining things. If we can communicate them but ineffectively, how much of the original meaning gets lost in translation (anywhere in the process of encoding, sending through a channel with context, having the receiver receive the message and decoding it through the noise in the environment[text Chap 1.1])?

From workplace/institutions to homes, from (non)verbal to written, from stranger to familiar, effective communication is required in all social aspects of our lives. We may think that mainstream communication is fairly intuitive, but it is not. There are barriers that must be overcome in order for one to listen effectively [text 1.3], and even a simple conversation packs nuances of nonverbal cues. Developing effective communication skills will allow us to search for these cues, to listen actively, and to bring across our thoughts/ideas WITH THE INTENDED RESULT.