Archive for the 'Communication Skills' Category

Every day we communicate–whether orally or written. Not a day goes by that we’re not communicating in some way with someone.

If you work outside your home, you communicate with the people you work with. Orally, you talk with your colleagues, you present information in meetings, or you train your staff.

With writing, you send emails, memos, and letters. You create proposals, articles, or books.

If you work at home, you communicate over the phone with coaching clients, or you call vendors, customers, or associates. You probably spend a lot of time on the Internet maybe communicating by email or through social networking sites, blogging, or your website.

And if you’re not in the active workforce, you converse every day with family, friends, merchants, and people in the community. You email, write letters, send birthday cards, or write in a journal, where you communicate with yourself.

With all this communication in your life, how effective do you think you are? Do people always get what you’re saying? Do they respond as you expect them to? Do they ask a lot of questions for clarification? Do they completely misinterpret your intentions?

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Do you experience intense, debilitating fear during social interactions?

If so, you might be suffering from social anxiety disorder, which can make you feel trapped and locked away from the world.

It’s quite normal for us to feel nervous or self-conscious in certain social situations.

For instance, giving a gift or going on date for the first time can give you that uncomfortable or anxious feeling of having butterflies in your stomach.

But, for some people, even certain common daily social situations like speaking at lunch time with their colleagues or classmates, can cause extreme nervousness or fear and become weak in engaging people.

This kind of feeling nervous to act in common social situations in life is usually referred as social anxiety disorder or social phobia.

Social anxiety disorder usually takes place in your adolescence and can turn into most severe form in your late teens and also in your 20’s.

In almost 25% of all individuals, it starts in their early childhood. Most of the people with this social phobia gradually learn to avoid stressful social situations in order to decrease their nervousness temporarily.

Communication is essentially considered as a life line and also an essential part for every organization.

It is an accepted truth that a better communication management in any workplace has a great importance in this competitive business world.

Managing the communication between employees and manager mainly plays a vital role for success in this uncompromising business world.

As a manager, it is very essential for you to improve your communication management skills for many reasons.

You are more likely to face many situations in your daily routine, where you have to communicate any new policy or process with your employees.

At certain times, where you need to understand the issues which have a major impact on delivery of results or improving the poor performances, your skill of communication is very important.

So, for these main reasons, it becomes very essential for you to improve your communication management skills. There are many benefits of improving your communication management. Some of them include:

You can avoid misunderstandings!

While communicating any new issue with your employee, it is quite possible for them to get a wrong idea about the issue or can possibly consider it as out of context. So, as a manager you can avoid such episodes.

Does this ever happen to you? Feeling shy or lacking self confidence to make conversation with strangers.

It can be a tough task for any one to make a better conversation with anyone, especially when you are quite strange to that particular person.

In addition to this, if you possess an introvert personality or lack in self confidence, then it becomes much more difficult for you to get along with people in certain special events like social gatherings or any parties.

So, it is very important for you to learn how to flourish well and also improve yourself to become more confident in conversing effectively.

Secret of assertive conversation!

The secret of communicating confidently and contentedly can be mainly enhanced with three easy principles. These fundamental principles mainly include:

• It would be much better for you to be more interested rather than being interesting.
• There can be nothing as flattering as attaining complete attention from other individual.
• Most of the people love to talk about their most wanted issue, which is about them only.

Try to keep these three important principles in your mind, which can help you greatly while you converse with a strange person.

Paralinguistic communication is the study of voice and how words are said.

When we open our mouths we disclose all kinds of things about ourselves that have nothing at all to do with the words we are uttering and controlling the nonverbal elements of our message can entirely change its meaning.

Paralinguistic cues refer to everything having to do with speech for the words we actually utter.

In communicating our intent, these may be a bit subtler other forms of nonverbal behaviors.

Certainly a booming, yelling voice is not subtle. However, a firm that conveys conviction is more nuanced than a pointing finger, big gestures, or the assault of one’s personal space.

Vocal cues contain:

• Quality: Quality normally refers to those vocal characteristics that let you to differentiate one voice from another. Is the voice small, feminine, or tremulous; thin, throaty, or fronted (aloof); tense, flat, grating, nasal, harsh, or shrill? All of these represent various combinations of rate, pitch, and volume.
• Intensity: How emphatic are the statements? For instance, “I really want you to do it now!” The intensity can be a thorough indicator of the speaker’s passion and commitment or lack of it!

When it comes to the differences between men and women, many stereotypes exist.

This is particularly true when it comes to communication styles between the two sexes.

We expect men to be somewhat devoid of emotion when communicating.

For women, however, the opposite is true.

Our expectation is that women should be the happy, cheerful sex, which is mirrored in the smiley-face syndrome.

Many miscommunications can occur since female and male facial styles vary so profoundly.

Anxiety of Woman To Read Facial Expression of a Man

When a woman can’t take a read on the man with whom she is talking, it makes her nervous. She becomes confused and begins to doubt herself. She might even become more animated to generate a reaction, but the man will cling to his stony demeanor.

Certainly, when a woman increases her expressiveness in this situation, the man may believe that she’s becoming overly emotional. This undercuts her credibility. These occasions prompt women to protest, “I get in trouble when I’m excited.” On account of male facial stonewalling, the woman may cut short the discussion, explode in a rage, or keep away from personal contact altogether.

The first step you can take to defuse the situation and solve whatever problems have arisen during an argument is by means of using active listening.

Realize, however, that when people feel strongly about an issue, their emotions will affect their ability to communicate and listen.

It is important therefore to make use of a combination of active and thoughtful listening skills. Following are the five techniques you can use to resolve conflicts and improve effective communication.

1. Avoid absolutes - right/wrong, bad/good. Phrases like “you always” or “you never” are absolutes that obstruct communication.

An active listener will notice these right away and answer with a statement such as, “I hear you saying I always do such and so, but actually I…” The same is true of statements that specify right/wrong or bad/good.

This is not to say there aren’t situations that are right or wrong, bad or good, but in an argument most right/wrong or bad/ good situations are simply exaggerations and the truth is somewhere in between. Sweeping generalizations polarize a conflict.

The focus then is not on solving the problem at hand, but instead the focus is on each party successfully defining her respective position.

E-mail, which is known as Electronic Mail has become most widely form of communication today for both personal and business use.

For speed of delivery, e-mail is the fastest way to go.

Correspondence gets from one place to another in a matter of minutes.

Once you decide to hook up to the Internet, your connection provides you with e-mail services and an e-mail address, which will look something in this fashion: YourName@someplace.com

Everything listed in your e-mail address means something. @ simply means at, and corn indicates the domain, in this case, a company. Other domains are:

1. edu - educational institution; for instance, nickname@nyu.edu for someone at New York University.

2. gov - government site; for example, nickname@nasa.gov for someone at NASA.

3. mil - military site; for example, nickname@af.mil for someone in the Air Force.

4. net - network site, for providers and hosts, for example: nickname@li.net for someone at Long Island Net.

5. org - organization sites that do not fit the other categorization; for example, nickname@AAG.org. for someone at the Association of American Geographers.