Effective Communication Skills (Blog Post #1)

Communication involves every aspect of our interactions with the people around us. Thus, communication and relationships are closely intertwined. Relationships with our family, friends or colleagues, can’t be forged and strengthened without communicating with them. Therefore, to be able to communicate effectively allows healthy relationships to be fostered and maintained. This is why I feel that developing effective communication skills is paramount in order to have good relationships to the people around us. More importantly, by establishing good and healthy relationships, we are exposing ourselves to more opportunities, either socially or professionally. Socially, i mean, by having good relationships with friends, they would be more than happy to introduce you to his/her friends. This enables us to widen our circle of friends and networks. The same goes for our professional relationships. Having such relationships not only allows you to have more opportunities to employment, it also opens up a lot of business possibilities. All this, however, is based on the assumption that one is able to communication efficiently.

Communication also involves the way in which we express our thoughts, feelings and ideas to people. No matter what we actually say to other people in words, we send out other kinds of information such as what we think of them, what we think of ourselves, and whether we are being sincere and genuine in what we say. It is our nonverbal communication, our gestures, body language, facial expressions and attitude, which speak volumes about us. This directly shapes how other people experience us and how they communicate in return. Therefore, to effectively communicate, one must be skilled in this regard. This aspect of communication, in my opinion, is not as easy to master as we need to pay a lot of attention to detail. But, like they always say, practice makes perfect.