ADI Part 3 - What is Communication?

What is Communication?

Wow. What a massive question in just three little words!

Communication is indispensable to your everyday life. You cannot learn, live or teach without it.

In simple terms, communication is the method that human beings use to convey message to each other. The messages can convey our thoughts, feelings, images and sounds.

In a conversation, one person sends a message whilst the other listens. The other then sends a message back, whilst the first one listens.

Communication is studied very widely and deeply by psychologists, and a great many 'rules' have been established over the years.

Salesmen and professional teachers alike, are trained and assessed on their ability to communicate. Their success in, either profession, is mainly dictated by their skills in communication.

The first and possibly most important point I'd like to make, is that

communication is a two way process

For effective communication, it is absolutely vital that you develop your listening skills, as well as your speaking skills.

If you constantly talk to another human being without looking at them, listening to them, or looking for the signs that tell you they understand you, how will you ever know if the other person understands you or knows what you mean?

Communication is very much reliant upon feedback. We say or do something, such as a hand gesture to 'move away from those parked cars', then we wait for the feedback . . . the learner actually does move away from the parked cars. Note, I do not condone the use of a hand gesture alone in this instance, but believe me, it's how many instructors communicate.

The feedback, or more technically the 'response', that we get from the person we are communicating with is extremely important.

Another well established psychological principle is that

the meaning of any communication is the response that it gets

Please take a few moments to really think about that . . . it puts the responsibility for getting the message across fairly and squarely onto the shoulders of the person trying to send it.

Have you ever had a conversation with someone who just couldn't understand what you were trying to say? Have you ever felt like asking someone if they were stupid because they couldn't see clearly what you wanted them to?

Well, the bad news is that it wasn't their fault. It was your fault. The responsibility is on the sender of the message, not the receiver.

What happens is that you think of something, and then express it in words, which you say. The other hears the words, interprets them, and reacts accordingly. The barriers are in the words or gestures we use, and the interpretation of them

If the receiver interprets things even minutely differently, they can get completely the wrong message. The sender needs to send the message and then actively assess the response to make sure that the correct message got through. If it didn't, the sender has to be flexible, not the receiver.

Much more on this in our page on vague or specific language.

This is a fascinating area of communication, and one that we don't need to delve into too deeply here. I'd ask you to simply accept this psychological principle as a fact of life. If you do, you'll soon find the value of considering what you say and how you say it to be priceless.

Communication is happening all the time. You may recall from the main communication page where I explained that people cannot not communicate. Even when alone. It's a non stop interaction between ourselves and everyone around us.

To conclude, communication is the sending and receiving of messages from one person to another or to themselves (creepy). Effective communication relies heavily on feedback to ensure that the correct message got through. The person sending the message has the responsibility to make sure that it is interpreted correctly.

ADIT Team