How Important is Effective Communication?

Why Is It Important to Communicate Well?

Communication is key to your success—in relationships, at home, at the workplace; as a citizen of your country; throughout your lifetime. Your ability to communicate comes from experience, and experience can be an effective teacher, but this article and the related business communication articles will offer you a wealth of experience gathered from professional speakers across various industries. You can learn from these professionals and be a more effective communicator right out of the gate. Business communication can be thought of as a problem solving activity in which individuals may address the following questions:

• What is the situation?
• What are some possible communication strategies?
• What is the best course of action?
• What is the best way to design the chosen message?
• What is the best way to deliver the message?

Business Communication for Success will examine this problem solving process and help you learn to apply it in the kinds of situations you are likely to encounter over the course of your career.

Communication Influences Your Thinking about Yourself and Others.

We all share a fundamental drive to communicate. Communication can be defined as the process of understanding and sharing meaning. You share meaning in what you say and how you say it, both in oral and written forms. If you could not communicate, what would life be like? A series of never-ending frustrations? Not being able to ask for what you need or even to understand the needs of others?

Being unable to communicate might even mean losing a part of yourself, for you communicate your self-concept—your sense of self and awareness of who you are—in many ways. Communication is expressing self.

Do you like to write? Do you find it easy to make a phone call to a stranger or to speak to a room full of people? Perhaps someone told you that you don’t speak clearly or your grammar needs improvement. Does that make you more or less likely to want to communicate?

For some, it may be a positive challenge, while for others it may be discouraging. But in all cases, your ability to communicate is central to your self-concept.

Take a look at your clothes. What are the brands you are wearing? What do you think they say about you? Do you feel that certain styles of shoes, jewelry, tattoos, music, or even automobiles express who you are? Part of your self-concept may be that you express yourself through texting, or through writing longer documents like essays and research papers, or through the way you speak.

On the other side of the coin, your communications skills help you to understand others—not just their words, but also their tone of voice, their nonverbal gestures, or the format of their written documents provide you with clues about who they are and what their values and priorities may be. Active listening and reading are also part of being a successful communicator.

Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books 
Chapter 1 [Effective Business Communication] from the book – Business Communication for Success

Speechless was here!