EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION: HOW TO BE AN EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATOR

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When communication is not complete

Read this interesting joke from Ghanaweb

A Ghanaian man, American man and Nigerian man were lost in a forest and were captured by cannibals. The king of the cannibals told the three friends that they could live if they pass a trial.

The 1st step was to go deep into the forest and get 10 pieces

of the same kind of fruits. The three men went their separate ways to gather fruits.

... The Ghanaian man came back and said to the king, "I brought 10 apples".

The King explained the trial to him.

King: You have to swallow the fruits without any expression on your face or you will be killed.

The first apple went in, but on the second one, he winced out in pain, so he was killed.

The American arrived and showed the king 10 berries. When the king explained the trial to him, he thought to himself that this should be

easy....1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and on the ninth berry, he burst out in laughter and was killed.

The Ghanaian and American met in heaven... The Ghanaian man asked, "Why did you laugh?, you almost got away with the trial"....then the American man replied, "I couldn't help it, I saw the Nigerian man coming with Watermelons!!!

Do you think if the Nigerian had known that they were going to swallow the fruit, would he have come with watermelons?

It is the same in our daily lives, we find ourselves not giving complete and clear message to other people, in the end we obtain results we never expected.

In other cases we use incomplete information like the Nigerian in the story to make our decisions. What we have is something we don’t like, something that is negative to our expectations.

When we are not effective listeners: Read this joke

Read this interesting joke, unfortunately I don't remember its source, but I found it in one of facebook users

A girl talking to her father: “Dad, I fell in love with our security guard, I am leaving with him.

Father’s reply: “It’s ok, you can go with him, I don't care”.

GIRL: “Dad wait, I have not finished to read this letter mom left for you”.

Though poor communication is mentioned as one of main causes of conflicts at community level, at workplaces, and even at family level, there seems to be no appropriate efforts from most of us to improve our communication skills.

Not only that poor communication leads to unnecessary conflicts, it is also responsible for business losses, loss of job vacancy, and in some cases deaths.

We sometimes engage in poor communication unintentionally. Some of us because of ignorance while others by negligence.

They say we communicate even when we don’t talk or write, but sometimes we forgot this fact.

Another important aspect that many of us forget is that talking or writing alone do not make us effective communicators. We have to be able to listen effectively.

The opposite of poor communication is effective communication. According to Oxford Dictionary, the word effective means: Producing effect that is wanted

Therefore, for us to say we are communicating effectively is to say our message produces effects that we intend them to do. The intention would be to persuade, to ask for forgiveness, to entertain, to instruct, to order, to warn,

For example someone was warning a friend, but this friend didn’t pay attention just because he thought it was just a joke! The problem in this example was how the message was presented; it was presented in such a way that the other person thought it was just a joke.

How can we improve our communication skills ? In the next post, I will outline suggestions on how to improve our communication skills.