Why effective communication skills are important for me

Hi =) welcome to my blog.

For me, effective communication skills are important as, based on what I've read, they are critical for building quality interpersonal relationships. Such relationships, in my opinion, form the core of the human existence. Based on a book by David W. Johnson, “Reaching Out: Interpersonal Effectiveness and Self-Actualization”, communication can be defined as, “exchanging messages to achieve understanding of each other’s perceptions, ideas and experience”. Such exchange however, has a strong potential for misunderstandings between people. This is because people can attach different meanings to the same words, or the same meaning to different words.  This phenomenon can thus lead to an incorrect interpretation of another’s words and hence lead to unnecessary anger and conflict. Personally, I do not think that my communication skills are very good, as I appear to have problems reading other people’s non verbal messages as well as understanding and assessing the emotions of others. Thus I would like to acquire effective communication skills through this module as I believe by improving my communication skills, I would be better able to express myself to others, understand what other people are saying to me, and in so doing, improve the quality of my interpersonal relationships.

Another reason why I think having good communication skills is important is that it would help me to help others better. Since we would encounter, sooner or later, friends in need of our advice or rebuke, I would like to learn how to be an effective communicator so that I can give concrete, courteous and constructive advice. In helping or advising people, I think it is important to empathize with people and see their situation from their point of view, before giving our own opinions on what they should do. I believe that learning effective communication skills would improve my ability to empathize with, and be courteous towards people, hence enabling me to be an effective counselor to my friends.

Lastly, I think effective communication skills are important to me in my career. I aim to be a scientist in the future, thus being able to communicate effectively in the workplace would be crucial to success in my career. This is because a scientist needs to be able to formulate hypothesizes in as concrete a way as possible, so that his colleagues would know exactly what he is trying to say. Furthermore, it is common for scientists to disagree with each other on which theory describes scientific phenomena most accurately. Therefore, acquiring good communication skills would allow me to argue for my case not only persuasively and accurately, but also courteously, so that I would not offend my colleagues who disagree with me .