Effective Communication Skills
Author: Faadiel Rehman

Have you ever notice what happens to someone when they cannot get their point across clearly?
Or they find it difficult to communicate an idea or thought.

What happens to you when you try to communicate something to someone and they just don’t get it?

This seems to be a very big problem, many consultants, life coaches and companies are looking for ways to deal with the problems related to communication and difficulties in relaying ideas and concepts clearly so that it could easily be understood.

Imagine what it would be like to be understood by everyone when you speak. Go ahead just close you eyes and imagine for a moment what that would be like.

Never ever being misunderstood!

When a person cannot communicate effectively there are many side effects that can occur. These side effects are very damaging to interpersonal skills or interrelationship skills on a very broad scale.

Let’s take up each one of these side effects:

Protests:
To Protest means (a.) a statement or action expressing disapproval or objection and (b.) an organized public demonstration objecting to an official policy or course of action.

Not being able to effectively communicate is a sure fire way of placing a person into a position of protesting. We see examples of this everyday.

Teenagers protest against their parents. Heck we have all protested one thing or another in our lives.

People who walk around with pickets protesting because they have not been given the chance to openly and freely communicate on the subject they are now protesting.

It’s that’s simple. You will only protest if you have not been allowed to fully communicate to your own satisfaction, the details or ideas you have about the very item you are now protesting.

So be aware for the protesting person, at work or home. I think it would be a good idea to over to the person and ask them to tell you exactly what is on their mind about whatever it is they are protesting.

Make is safe for them to tell you anything no matter how insane or illogical. Just listen…

You can follow up the talk with questions like this.
Tell me more about! Is there more to it? Is that all of it?

Being Upset:
Upsets usually occur when the person was previously feeling positive about something and then for some reason they wound up on the negative side of the issue.

It is usually followed by some degree of disorder for the person; you will notice that their desk is constantly crowded with papers and other such bric-a-brac.

Again this stems directly from areas of communication. The person may have been trying to express a certain idea or communicating something to someone at home or work and they were stopped dead in their tracks.

Sometimes it does not take much to cause an upset. It can be as simple as “Oh who cares about that?” Voila, the person will sometimes agree… yeah you are right who cares about that! Notice that their mood immediately changes from feelings of being positive to feeling negative.

Something they care about has just been stepped on!
So be aware of causing upsets, at work or home. Again I think it would be a good idea to go over to the person or family member and ask them to tell you exactly what is on their mind about whatever it is they are upset about.

Make it safe for them to tell you anything no matter how insane or illogical. Even if you caused the upset! Just listen…

You can follow up the talk with questions like this.
Tell me more about! Is there more to it? Is that all of it?

Problems:
See Previous Chapter – Solving Problems. In this case the problem is not being able to communicate an idea, which can lead to other problems in life as well.

If the person has many problems then help them solve these problems by doing the problem solving procedure in the Solving Problems Chapter.

Compulsive Behavior:

This is a very interesting side effect. You cannot communicate an idea so it becomes an incomplete thought or action which you had hoped to perform successfully but you were stopped from doing it so now you’re stuck with it.

You don’t know where to put it in your mind so you shift it around your thoughts for a while but it just won’t go away. Eventually you can’t see it anymore because ignoring may make it go away… or better still forget about it.

Many people make a conscious decision to forget things that have happened to them. The funny part of it is that they actually do forget, but that does not mean that the problem is gone just because it has been forgotten.

In fact that forgotten though is still pretty much alive and well and stored on your mental computer somewhere. Every now and then like a virus scanner it activates and runs without you even knowing about it.

Have you ever done something and then stopped midway through it asking yourself “Now why the heck did I just do that?”

But at the bottom of these side effects is the fact that the person creates the communication barriers by choice. The person has decided to stop communicating.

If the person is the one who has decided to stop communication then it can mean only one thing; you can push past communication barriers without too much concern about the reasons for the communication barriers. It’s a decision and that’s all there is to it.

Remember when you were a kid and you decided to just stop talking until some coaxed you into talking again? Same thing!!

This brings up a very interesting point about communication, which is the feeling of being able to safely communicate what you would like to communicate.

Feeling like you could safely communicate anything gives you the opportunity to push through the barriers of communication.

Once you have handled the barriers to communication then the need to communicate compulsively or obsessively just magically disappear, so you can use good judgment instead of upsetting people with inappropriate communications and compulsive banter.

There are a few ways to handle these communications barriers. One way that I know of which can be pretty difficult is to find someone who is willing to listen you banter over and over about anything and everything, unrestrained talking, good or bad no matter how illogical, insane or idiotic it sounds.

The other person would of course have to just listen and without making any judgments.

Exercises can be found in "How To Make Work Fun And Put Your Career Into Overdrive - By F.B. Rehman" - see www.howtomakeworkfun.com for more info and these communication exercises.







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Author, Life Coach, Speaker and Success Training

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