Saturday, August 30, 2008 1:37 PM
The Problems.....
The below situation is a true account and I welcome all solutions as the problem still lingers on till date. I have a clique of friends whom I knew for a very long time. Since the group size is actually quite big, it is inevitable that a few of us who shared similar sporting interest form closer friendship. We tend to share the ups and downs in one another’s life inside this small group since we met up frequently for sports.
Problems soon arise between my group and R when we had a gathering among my bigger group of friends. During our casual conversation, I asked my other friend about the aftermath of her problem which she shared with me during our last small group meeting. To our surprise, R gave an angry look and exclaimed why she has no knowledge of that issue at all. We explained to R that she has no knowledge of it because she did not attend our small group gatherings. R pressed on saying that we did not even asked her in the first place. I have to admit that the fault lies with us because we fail to inform R about our gatherings after getting rejected for a few times. Things ended on a sour note with us ensuring R that she will definitely be informed of future gatherings.
As such, we did as promised by informing R of the future gatherings but got rejected as usual. The same scenario happened again but this time round, we hinted her that it is difficult for her to know everything since she isn’t interested in any of our sports gathering. R told us off saying that we are still able to share problems even though she missed all our gatherings. On one hand, we know that some things are only meant to be shared within closer friends. But on the other, if we do not share the information with R, further conflicts would arise. Sensing that any further explanation might deepen our misunderstandings, we took the blame for the causation of the whole conflict.
Currently tied on both hands, we can only try to prevent such things from happening but we all know that the same thing will bound to happen again. What can we do to solve this?
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Friday, August 22, 2008 7:06 PM
Significance of Effective Communication
Since the day we are born, communication has played an important role in our daily lives. Be it for personal or professional reasons, it is no doubt that communication allows us to better transmit information between one another. Appropriate usage of words and non verbal expressions not only reduces the risk of misunderstandings but also forms the basis of all kinds of relationships.
Throughout our educational period, students are often trained to utilize the verbal and written skills of communication. Writing skills is the most essential part of report writing as it serves to present ideas or results in a clear and concise manner. Professors will not want a report which is ambiguous and beats around the bush since they have tons of scripts to grade. The consequence of such poor writing ability is of course the bad grades that end up in our transcript.
Oral skills are equally as important when we engage in presentations where we have to present the gist of the research findings to our superiors. Imagine a monotonous speaker who takes 30 minutes to enter his main project aims. Audience will gradually lose interest through the presentation process or even fall asleep before the speaker can even touch on his findings.
Furthermore, as we embrace globalization, effective communication skills takes on an even greater significance in our interactions with people of different cultural and religious background. On top of the fundamental verbal and writing skills, it is also essential to extent our knowledge of communication to incorporate such differences. Take the language and cultural differences of Singapore and Japan as an example. Singaporean usually greets others with a simple hello with an occasional handshake. However, hand shake is usually uncommon in Japanese greetings as they usually bow to show respect to one another. Thus, it is yet another aspect of communication that we must acquire if we happen to do any business dealings overseas in the future.
All in all, I would like to end the post with the picture below. Never neglect the power of communication as it might be the missing puzzle to a successful relationship.
Source: http://www.communicationmatters.org.uk/Publications/Videos
/The_Power_of_Communication/the_power_of_communication.html
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