Communication skills are important. Essential.
If you have the greatest idea ever created, but you simply can't get it across, then you may as well not know how to talk.
If you find a way to uplift somebody and make them feel better, but don't know how to get your message across, then you may as well have stayed home.
What goes into communication skills? To begin with, what is communication? Obviously, it requires to people, and some kind of message.
When thinking of communicating, most people simple imagine using words, sentences, and paragraphs. But one thing that living in several foreign countries has shown me is that most of the time, our body language, facial expression and tone of voice come into play a lot more than we think.
It's often quoted that 93% of our communication is non-verbal. But what does this even mean?
Imagine if you were talking to somebody, and you were only able to use words. No facial expressions, no gestures, no body language. It would even be less effective than communicating on a forum or through a blog.
At least on forums and blogs, we can think about what we say, and write something over and over again until we get it right.
But when we're speaking in the moment, it doesn't always come out that way. After all, our brains simply can't think of that many words.
I'm sure you have the experience of reading an interesting blog post. Maybe you get a bit distracted, but you keep reading, or at least you think you keep reading.
Then you decide you need to go back a few paragraphs and pick up what you missed, because now you're completely lost.
You just can't do this in a face to face conversation. There's a lot less room for error.
Another thing that comes into play is we always have a bit of "fear" in the back of our minds. Unless we're talking to a buddy we've known since kindergarten, there's always that ever present fear of rejection.
This is still there when posting to blogs and forums, but you can easily turn it off. If somebody doesn't laugh at one of your jokes, or doesn't take your ideas seriously, you can't turn them off.
The most important thing is to make sure you understand the other person's criteria, as well as your own intentions. The stronger of an intention you have, the more likely you'll be able to quickly and easily find out how effective you can communicate.
In further posts, we'll be talking about how to do this with even more accuracy.
