Communication in Everyday Life - Essay Example

Communication in everyday life Being an expert at the art of communication is integral in every aspect of everyday life. Communication is required not only for social reasons, but it is also a prerequisite for professional success. Businesses have been driven to greater levels of success through effective communication. Balancing the equation of the importance of everyday conversation in routine life are personal relationships. Personal relationships rely greatly on effective communication. From the perspective of one’s profession, communication is necessary to relay business ideas effectively to colleagues (Rampage). It is also needed for prepping subordinates for a particular task; the more effective the communication is, the better the subordinates are going to perform their job, since they are clear in their directive. In group activities and for healthy teamwork, it is fundamental for members to communicate coherently and clearly; this will have long-lasting effect on the concerted efforts of the members and in the completion of the task smoothly. Having the necessary skills to communicate effectively is needed for getting along with one another and for preventing any chances of annoying colleagues. Furthermore effective communication in professional life is also vital to not give people the impression that one is regarding them in a derogatory way. Therefore, it follows that communication in a professional environment should be clear, polite and articulate enough to avert any possibility of the audience misinterpreting the speech. A lot of debates that occur in daily life are the result of ineffective communication. One way of understanding ineffective communication is through the dynamics of congruency. Congruence refers to being all what a person is at a given point with another individual (Brothers 14). It helps to make a communication easier and understandable. People strive for congruence in their daily lives, but often fail to achieve it. On the other hand, congruence is seen in the works of some of the best artists. It is expressed so explicitly that it makes communicating the message in the artwork very smooth. As a result spectators often wonder why they never thought of the concept themselves; however, the reason for such explicit ease of understanding is that artists are able to achieve very high levels of congruence. Artists pay a lot of attention to incongruence in their works. It can be argued that they do not heed cultural norms, but actually they do have knowledge of how people interact with their culture. The difference in the works of individual artists relates to the level of importance that they attach to congruence. Some artists are seen to be more receptive to congruency and thus endeavor to make their works more congruent and to decrease the tensions that might arise if the work is incongruent with the cultural norms of the region. The purpose of the artist is to reproduce the ongoing series of events in a simpler, accurate and more perceptive way. Communication through arts is actually a way of mirroring the things that are occurring in the society which people are unable to locate or identify. Congruence is not only applicable to arts but also extends to other aspects of life. There is no better way for improving one’s health, relationships and performance than through congruence (Carlson, and Sperry 340). Generally, people make an effort to achieve congruence. They do this by being very meticulous and studying the details, sets and the isolates closely. This usually entails that they repeat and reconsider a statement over and over again, improvising it to make it clearer and more coherent so that people can understand them better. However there is still little research that has been done on congruence, and it is so little understood even by ordinary people that they are mostly unable to pick out the weaknesses in faulty conversations. Therefore they are unable to establish whether people are actually delivering honest sincere conversation or are they merely feigning it; such attitude is also primarily responsible for wars. When people are not able to communicate effectively, and the audience are not understanding the meaning and purpose of the communication, the person who is communicating sometimes resort to physical means, like punching someone, to make people comprehend his or her message. There are different patterns that exist that dictate the nature of conversation in everyday life. Patterns refer to the implicit cultural rules through which sets are organized in a meaningful way. These patterns differ from one culture to the other, and therefore substantiate the fact that there are differences in the communication and cultural norms that exist from one culture to the next. This can be understood by analyzing the cultural patterns in the US from the eye of an outsider. At the start of the century, there were a number of Chinese who moved to the US. It was increasingly difficult for them to settle in an environment that was alien to them. However, there exists a similarity in the culture of the Japanese and the Americans; both have a hierarchal, status system deeply embedded in their culture. From the perspective of the Chinese, the Americans are very noisy people and their ceremonies are hard to blend into and to enjoy. When an American businessman meets an American peer, they meet each other noisily, thumping each other on the back. They offer each other cigars, which both politely decline. However, on further insistence, the individual who is lower in status accepts the cigar of the person with a higher status. Furthermore, there are differences in the formal patterns that are observed in different cultures. In America, crying is associated with grief and laughing with happiness, with women finding it easier to cry than men. However the situation is different in China. Laughing, in China, does not primarily mean joy. A person may also laugh to cover up his embarrassment. Knowledge of congruency and the importance of patterns in communication are two of the most important concepts that I gained during my course. Congruency is embedded in every aspect of a person’s life. For instance, a student is preparing a speech for a speech competition. He would focus on not only making his speech persuasive, coherent and easy to understand, but also focus on his manner of delivery. He would focus on the finer details of speech delivery and improve upon the areas for reducing any ideas that can lead to misinterpretation of the speech. In effect, the student would aim to achieve congruency. Understanding patterns gains more importance when a person is travelling to foreign land, working in multinational with people of various ethnicities or attending multi-cultural parties. Individuals need to be flexible and open to differences in culture in order to avoid any misinterpretations or delivery of an inappropriate message. There are also several models of communication. The purpose of models is to make an idea much simpler by representing it in graphic forms. Models were not developed in the study of communication; rather they were taken from other fields of study (Stone Singletary, and Richmond 28). Two of the models that are used commonly today in communication study are Harold Lasswell’s list of statements and Shannon and Weaver communication transmission model. Lasswell’s model encompassed a description of the human communication. This included the speaker or the person who sends the message, what the message says, what channel is used for communication and the recipient of the message as well as its effect on the recipient. Shannon and Weaver communication transmission model described how communication occurs through the use of transmitters to transmit information, defined in terms of signals rather than messages, and how electronic circuits receive them (Stone Singletary, and Richmond 28). Works Cited Brothers, Barbara Jo. Virginia Satir: foundational ideas. Routledge, 1991. Web. 4 Dec. 2010. Carlson, Jon, and Len Sperry. Brief therapy with individuals and couple. Zeig Tucker & Theisen Publishers, 2000. Web. 4 Dec. 2010. Rampage, Twin. The Need for Effective Communication in Everyday Life. Associated content, Yahoo, 2008. Web. 4 Dec. 2010. Stone, Gerald, Michael W. Singletary, and Virginia P. Richmond. Clarifying communication theories: a hands-on approach. Wiley-Blackwell, 1999. Print. Read More