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| Miscommunication |
Everyone communicates with different people every day. Sometimes the communication may run smoothly while on certain occasion, the communication may not end up to the way we want it to be. Even worst, it may come to a situation in which both parties eventually seeing one another as enemy. How can these all scenarios happen?
When we talk about relationship with other people, effective communication plays a big role. In simple, effective communication means the ability to communicate our ideas or thoughts clearly to the other parties as well as being able to identify whether they really understand what we are trying to communicate. Besides that, we must also be a good listener and have a good understanding of what the other parties are trying to communicate. The choice of communication channel is crucial in effective communication. Therefore, we need to identify the audience as well as the channel that may work best for an effective communication to happen.
Effective communication has been a major concern for me. I believe that it is very important, be it on maintaining my relationship with family, relatives, friends or even someone whom I just knew. Besides that, I find it useful for me when I need to liaise with different speakers/organizations to invite them to my CCA events. The same goes to the success of an interview as well.
In maintaining my relationship, the first thing I do is to identify the characteristics of the people who I communicate with. I tend to differentiate the way I communicate with people who are easy-going, shy, friendly, or easily irritated. Besides that, I also use different approaches to communicate in different context. For example, we need to differentiate the way we communicate in a meeting (which is in serious mode) and in the conversation during spare time (less tense mode).
Effective communication is also an important element in my CCA. In my CCA, I have the responsibility to invite speakers/organizations to our CCA events. In order to ensure that I get the speakers on time and the activities to run smoothly, I need to do liaising with different speakers. Some speakers are alright with invitation just through email while others might prefer to be called through phone. Sometimes, the speakers even prefer me to meet up them to get things clearer to them. Before liaising with the speakers, I usually consult with seniors from previous committee to get advice on what is the best approach to get different speakers. Furthermore, I also need to apply different approaches to communicate with the speakers since the communication channels and the characteristics of each speakers is different.
Another important application of effective communication is during the interview. I had been to several interviews. Some of them were successful while others were not. I feel that there is a mix ratios between luck and effective communication in a success of an interview. Interviewers might have a bias judgement. However, apart from the luck, I still believe that effective communication is very crucial since it leaves the first impression to the interviewers and will increase our chance of getting through the interview.
The importance of effective communication in the working world is not surprising for me. On the last Thursday of week 2, I was attending an event called Suit-Up 2011! In that event, we were given the opportunity to network with the companies that we might be interested in. As I approached their booth and asked them questions regarding their job qualification, most of them mentioned communication skills as one of their most important criteria. This real scenario shows us that effective communication is very crucial nowadays in getting a job.
In conclusion, I believe that effective communication is very important in every aspect of my life and this is also one of the reasons that motivate me to keep on improving my communication skills.
