The ability to express our emotions, our thoughts and views is vital to a happy survival. Be it professional life or personal life, communication makes it all easy for us. However, good communication skills cannot be dubbed as merely having a good command over a language, or even just the ability to express. It is a healthy and measured balance of both these abilities that makes for good communication. Lack of any of these two abilities can cause a lack of proper communication, thereby creating problems. Effective communication is the primary skill that you need to develop irrespective of your field and profession because anyone—from your wife to your boss and even your best friend—can easily misinterpret and misunderstand your idea if it isn’t appropriately presented. For communication to be effective, it should be concise, correct, complete, courteous and constructive. Read further for more on the role that communication plays in our day-to-day lives.
Types Of Communication Skills
According to action research studies, there are mainly three types of communication skills.
Expressive Skills
These skills are typically important when you communicate information to another person. Normally, communication takes place in three stages. First, you gain the other person’s attention, then convey the information using the most appropriate words and then finally check whether the listener got your point or not. Vague communication often results in misunderstanding or misinterpretation.
Listening Skills
This is opposite of expressive skills. Listening skills are essential to understand what the other person is trying to communicate. This again is a compound process with three parts — listening, interpreting and then conveying what you understood. Here, the last part is very important because it helps to eliminate misunderstandings, if any.
Communication Management
It is important to manage process issues in communication or else the original issue might just go unconveyed or uncommunicated. Your chief priority should be to eliminate any issues that can affect communication between you and the other person. Having positive feelings is extremely important and so are accuracy, relevance and specificity of the information.
Importance of Communication skills
In Personal Relationships
-
Communication is the core of a healthy relationship. Having a grasp over communication would mean you express more, listen intently and understand viewpoints clearly. This is what can make a satisfying relationship.
-
Good communication skills make you understand the need for keeping in contact. Therefore, every time you think that why you should be the first one to initiate contact with someone, just remember that communication is the ultimate way to break the ice and be in touch.
-
All reservations about taking initiatives often stems from lack of confidence or fear to establish a comfortable path to take the conversation further.
In Professional Environments
-
Good communication skills is what you need to have if you wish to express ideas, knowledge and even your feelings in an impressive way and get people to understand and empathize with you.
-
Communication skills provide you with the choice to convey information to the target audience and derive the best results. For example, a skilled developer can build up maximum business by convincing the clients with his interpersonal skills, negotiation skills and convincing skills, which are the pillars of effective communication.
-
Communication skills are actually a channel of interaction, which are essentially interdependent on other qualities like self-development, interpersonal skills, mutual understanding, cooperation and trust. Communication skills are channels to execute good management skills as well.
-
To be a good team player, you have to create an ambience of open communication with concise messages, clarifications and better listening.
In General
-
Style of communication is the factor that decides whether a conversation is to be taken forward or not.
-
Communication plays an important role in creating good impressions on other people and thus, it is very important that you communicate vividly and effectively.
-
In situations, which are neither professional nor personal, you should keep a combination of formal and casual style as completely formal style may impede the conversation by creating a distance and a complete casual style may create a perfunctory impression on others.
Effective communication helps to pass on information, build better relationships, helps you to achieve your goals, boosts your self-esteem, helps you to think better and contributes towards better understanding.
