The Importance of Critical Thinking in Human Life, Business and Education Sectors - Literature review Example

Critical Reflection Journal Student’s Name Institutional Affiliation Critical Reflection Journal Communication is an essential part of human life. Not existences can occur without people sharing ideas and information. Therefore, proper and correct communication skills and aspects are required to be mastered by people so as to avoid misunderstanding when communicating or sharing ideas. It is on this basis that this paper will look at various aspects of communication in a more detailed perspective and how they transpire in my life. Critical thinking is a discipline that deals with skillful and active conceptualization, synthesizing applying and evaluating information collected from the experience, observation, communication, and reasoning or reflection as a guide to doing a task or deciding on a particular action or event. Critical thinking is based on the universal intellectual worth that requires accuracy, precision, relevance, consistency, depth and fairness[Haa10]. Critical thinking is very important in human life, especially in the business and education sectors. For instance, it equips students with the ability not only of understanding what they have been taught or read but also to build upon their experiences[Ana13]. It teaches learners that education is fluid, and it flows once you have given yourself to learn and it does not fully entail memorizing the subjects unquestionably. This allows the students to engage in learning by doing or by participation from each other. Critical thinking also enables students to evaluate their thinking and behavior on the various issue related to their lives hence allowing them to make a reasonable and defensible decisions about matters that are related to their community[Dah01]. Consequently, having the courage to take action against the challenges they are facing in their community. More precisely, critical thinking has significantly enabled me to make individual decisions about certain situations at home and at school. I have applied critical thinking to understand the roles and significances of understanding people's cultures and embracing them hence regulating my behaviors towards different cultures. Communication also involves verbal and non-verbal communication. Verbal communication includes the use of words, sound, and language to pass and receive a message from the other person. While not -verbal communication is the communication which involves body styles, use of visual cues and expression and gestures[Par141]. Verbal communication is very crucial in imparting knowledge to the other people, especially students. It ensures that information about a particular theme is clarified in an organization so that confusions and misunderstanding can be avoided. Moreover, it is easy to correct a wrong thing through verbal communication than nonverbal communication. It is because people express their emotions through words hence it is easy to correct a wrong. Recent studies have found out that social life and behavior of people are influenced on how they communicate with other individuals hence the importance of verbal communication. Recently at schools, teachers have been encouraging us, as students to develop good verbal communication skills so that we can be able to pass information to other people more precisely and have the ability to impart knowledge to the other students as well as other people in the society. Non-verbal communication is very important in the sense that it is not biased since it includes people with hearing difficulty. It also provides privacy to those who are communicating. Only people who can speak and understand the verbal language will be the ones to understand the meaning. More so, nonverbal communication also brings people together especially the eye contact between two people. Developing the non-verbal communication has greatly impacted my social life as I can communicate with people of varied nature. It has expanded my understanding and association in school as well as outside the school. Motivation and learning are also other aspects of communication. Motivation is the act of reenergizing, sustaining and directing behaviors. The objectives provide the impetus for and give the direction of actions to be taken. On the same note, action entails efforts and persistence so that some activities can be sustained for a particular period. Motivation and learning are important in that motivation increase the performance of both students and employees in an organization. It enhances initiation and persistence of activities[Ess07]. Persistence in return increases the time students spend on a task, and this result in increased performance and learning more things. On the same note, motivation and learning also are factors that determine the strengths of an organization to achieve the highest profitability and compete with the other rival firms. The organization that values motivation and learning, their employees are regularly equipped with new skills and experiences thus resulting in profitability. Moreover, the employees who are motivated have a high morale of carrying out their activities and therefore bringing high revenues to the organization. At my school, the best performing students are rewarded with gifts so as to motivate the other students to work hard and get the same gifts. This has widely led to stiff competition in classes as everyone want to get the gifts. Consequently, this leads to increased learning and performance. The topic of communication also entails interpersonal communication. Interpersonal communication is the process by which people exchange information, meanings, and feelings through verbal and non-verbal messages. Majorly interpersonal communication does occur through face-to-face communication. In business management and other organizational based structures, success depends wholly on the relationship between people. How people understand each other rely on the interpersonal skills as it will help the employees as well as the students to gain awareness of their skills and learn that an awareness of the interpersonal relationships of the other persons assist in dealing with the work tasks they are a responsible for or the knowledge they need rely on the other persons. One of the major components of the interpersonal communication is the listening. Averagely people spend 45% of their time listening and communicating with other individuals. Active listening skills provide more information and help in avoiding misunderstandings between people and the tasks they are given to perform[Par141]. Excellent interpersonal communication skills make people work more efficiently in groups and teams which sometimes are formal like in the case of the work or informally like the associations of the students in class. Quite often than not, work situations present the employees to work in groups that have people from different background and whom they may have little in common. The same is depicted in the school set up where the students come in a group to work on the assignment or help each other in class despite their differences in background. Initially, these two groups may experience a moment of awkwardness before they get used to each other. Through interpersonal skills, the groups will get to know one another and work together to achieve the set goals and objectives. In the school established, the communication between other students and me has fostered my great understanding with other individual propelling my understanding of various subjects and activities. Again, through interpersonal communication my agreement with the teachers has been improved as I get to know what it takes to understand people from different background. Mediated communication is the communication that is carried out by the use of information communication technology and sometimes can be contrasted face-to-face. However, in the modern world technology has transformed this type of communication due to the introduction of computers and the internets[Dah01]. This has resulted in the birth of computer-mediated communication. Computer-mediated communication is the process in which human share information and ideas through one or more networked telecommunication system. They communication occurs through numerous forms such as internet relay chats, instant messaging, mailing list servers, emails and Usenet (Ess, Kawabata, & Kurosaki, 2007). Computer mediated communication has a lot of influence and importance to the lives of people. For instances, it brings media richness in the society. Media richness describes the capacity of the medium of communication; email, texts or phone calls to pass human emotions, reveal nonverbal cues, provide feedback and pass various tonal variations from one person to another. This will bring understanding between the people as they can tell what is being said and what feelings are being conveyed by such information[Ess07]. Computer-mediated communication is also vital in that it encourages hyper-personal relationships in students and makes them reduce their communication apprehension. The asynchronous communication lag availed by this communication gives the students time to compose their thoughts. The network-based nature of this communication allows students to engage actively in the course materials, class discussions and collaborative learning with other students. Computer-mediated communication has personally helped me to carry out my research efficiently as it avails all the information I require for my project. More so, it allowed me to ask for clarifications from the teachers and other fellow students thus giving a range of information access to carry my class work. Another aspect of communication is the group dynamic. The group dynamic is the study of forces that exists within a group. It is human nature to want to belong to a particular group making the teams very dynamic in their content and compositions. In any organization or society where people associate, there are many groups that erupt. This group provides a social ground where they interact with each other. Many a time teams have objectives that they aim to achieve in the organization or class. The group dynamic is crucial in the society since it brings job satisfaction to its members. Again, it improves students' performance. This is because poor performing student can be converted to real thinkers thus improving their performance. The group dynamic is widely used at school. I participate in a lot discussion groups which help us to improve our performance. Leadership skills are also one of the aspects of communication. Leadership skills are the skills and experiences a leader is required to have to lead people or an organization. These skills are crucial as they help in driving every aspect of a firm giving commitments and resolving issues in the society. Leadership skill entails aspects such as managing performance, improving teamwork, motivating the employees or the people you are in charge of and communicating the required information to the people. Real leadership at any level increases people cooperation in the organization. For instances, recently at work, the employees went on strike since the manager could not address the issues that were affecting us in the organization. This has led to uncooperativeness in the organization hence leading to wastage of resources and time. On the other hand, conflict negotiation is also a concept involved in communication. Conflict negotiation is the process of dealing and conflict resolution in an organization. It requires that the parties involved giving up some of their interest so as to support an agreed mid-point solution. This process involves more of collaborations which result in less commitment to the outcome of the resolution. Negotiation conflict is important as it promotes harmony in the organization. For the resolution to be achieved each party has to agree that they are in conflict and communicate their views on the matters so as to get to a resolution. The negotiation between the conflicting parties depends on the proper communication between the parties. The parties must try to make their case persuasive argument, coming up with creative options and listening carefully to the other side. Sometimes the party on the wrong makes a forward move and give a heartfelt admission that they are wrong and apologizes. As in the case of work, the manager should have involved us in the negotiation so as to reach an agreement instead of involving a conflict. Every organization requires ethics to govern its operations. Ethics are the moral principles and conducts that govern an organization. Ethics helps in promoting fairness, mutualism, honesty, and respect for the workplace or other institutions. With ethics, individuals' behavior can be molded so that the set goal can be achieved. In the school set up, students are given rules and regulations to help in molding their behaviors and work with each other. The same is seen in other business organization where the actions of the individuals are guided by the organizational ethics. The values have helped be to cooperate with other students and at work hence molding my behavior. Intercultural communication is also one of the aspects of the communication. It involves communication between two or more people of different linguistic and cultural background. Intercultural communication is important because it empowers people with the ability to deal across cultures, therefore, improving peoples' understanding of other people and their cultures. Capacity to understand other people's cultures brings globalization and multicultural work. This brings a good understanding between nations and individuals. In the modern time, the society has changed, and people associate and communicate with people from all walks of life. Good communication skills help individuals to understand each other. More so, it is very hard nowadays to get a school with only students from one continent. Many of my friends come from different contents hence intercultural communication has helped to interact with them and share ideas. References Haa10: , (Haase, 2010), Ana13: , (Anastasi, 2013), Dah01: , (Dahlberg, 2001), Par141: , (Parikh, Esposito, & Searock, 2014), Ess07: , (Ess, Kawabata, & Kurosaki, 2007), Read More