 Hi, my name is Angela Kegler and I'm going to be your instructor for this upcoming course. Allow me to take a moment to introduce myself. You may be wondering, what does she know about this course or why she qualified to teach me? Well, I want you to feel comfortable in knowing that I've sat in your shoes and I have a PhD in organizational development. In addition to my academic experience, I also have several years training and teaching in an organizational environment and leading teams, folks just like yourself and helping them to advance their career. I hope that the content you're about to review will help you and you're able to take it back to the workplace so that you can become more effective and more efficient in your job. Enjoy the course and happy learning. We'll begin by looking at identifying basic communication techniques. Let's begin with how communication works. Communication is the transfer of information from one communicator to another through the use of written or spoken words, symbols, touch, or gestures. For communication to be effective, both parties need to understand the message that's being transferred. All communication relies on the fact that there is a sender and a receiver. The sender is the communicator who originates the message. The receiver is the communicator who receives the message. The message conveys the sender's communication intent to the receiver. The process begins with the sender wanting to share an idea or message with another person or receiver. The sender encodes the message into a form that the receiver can easily understand. The sender transmits the message to the receiver via a communication channel. That could be email, phone, face-to-face, or any other type of communication methodology that we discuss. The receiver receives the message, decodes it, and provides feedback on the sender. Effective communication occurs when the sender and the receiver share the same meaning for the message. One of the key elements for communication to be effective is listening skills. Both the sender and the receiver have to have strong listening skills. Let's look at some best practices for improving your listening skills. First of all, for you to be able to listen, you'll have to stop talking. When you're talking, you cannot hear or decode the message that others are giving to you. So when you stop talking and start listening, you can then begin to understand and hear the message that's being conveyed to you. Another strong listening skill is to not interrupt the speaker. When someone is speaking to you, it's natural for your brain to start thinking about how you want to respond, and often we find ourselves interrupting the speaker to engage in dialogue on our own. It's important to not interrupt the speaker, knowing that your brain may be going off on what you want to respond with. Try to be present. Turn off what you want to say as opposed to interrupting. Try to be present and listen to what the speaker is saying. Concentrate on what the speaker is saying. This allows you to understand as well as hear what the speaker's message is. Pay attention to the speaker's body language. In addition to the words that the speaker is conveying in his or her message, the body language will tell you a tremendous amount about what they're trying to convey. It will speak to how they feel and what they really think, tone, pitch of the voice, as well as facial expressions, gestures, and how their body is moving. When you hear the message that the speaker has given to you, paraphrase the speaker's words back to the speaker after the speaker finishes. The reason you would want to paraphrase in your own words is to ensure with the speaker that you understand what he or she is saying to you and through paraphrasing, your mind will comprehend the message well enough to engage in additional dialogue. And finally, the best skill you can begin the practice when you're listening is after the speaker has communicated with you, ask questions about what they have conveyed. By asking questions, you can engage the speaker in opening up and giving you more information that will allow you to deeper understand what the speaker's message is about and engage in dialogue in such a way that the sending and receiving of messages is more understandable and you comprehend better. Perception plays a large part in communication. Let's talk about what perception is first. Perception is the way in which communicators view or understand a message. It's going to be unique to each individual and it influences how the receiver understands the sender's message. Because of perception, there's often misunderstandings and that's why paraphrasing is so important. It's also important to have what we call a perceptual filter. A perceptual filter is a conduit in which an individual screens and interprets a message based on his or her beliefs or values. Now gender and culture are perceptual filters. Let's think about what a perceptual filter does in that messaging. When a sender conveys a message to the receiver, the receiver has his or her own perceptual filter in which the message goes through. The receiver of the message hears and perceives that message a certain way. Now we spoke about listening skills and the need to paraphrase back. The perceptual filter will take that message and when the paraphrase in the receiver's own words is communicated back to the sender, in the event that that perceptual filter is incorrect, this is where paraphrasing comes into play. It will allow the sender of the message to say yes or no, you understand it correctly. So as the receiver of the message receives the message, the perceptual filter conveys the message back through paraphrasing, it then confirms understanding or misunderstanding. There are some key rules to effective communication and to make this simple, we're going to call it the ABCs of effective communication. Let's take a look at the three ABCs that you can follow. The first one is always be concise. Don't say more than you need to. If you can keep your message to one topic or one point, this will allow you to be concise. Although your thinking process may move quickly from one topic to another, others that you are speaking with or writing to may not follow your logical path, so try to be concise and keep your points to one message. The second ABC is always be clear. Get to the point. Other than maybe a courteous introduction, you want to get to the heart of your message directly. If you can't describe what you need in two or three sentences, then you may want to go back and examine if you really know what you want before you communicate. And the final ABC of effective communication is always be courteous. Good manners are always important. Making people politely shows respect, and it helps to ensure that others are receptive to your message. Please thank you and excuse me are the most powerful phrases in both spoken and written messages. There are two types of communication, and we engage in them on a daily basis. This is definitely something you would engage in in the workplace. The first one is synchronous communication. This is communication that occurs or exists at the same time. Face-to-face communication or talking on the telephone or even listening to a talk radio show. That's synchronous communication. Let me explain what that means. If we are face-to-face and we're communicating, we're in the same time period and we're having dialogue back and forth. That's synchronous communication as opposed to asynchronous communication. Asynchronous communication does not occur or exist at the same time or even in the same time period or phase. Think about voicemail or email or written communication. Thinking of email, you may write an email and send it and may not receive a response until maybe the next day. That's asynchronous communication because it does not happen in the same time period. There are several different types of communication methods. Let's take a look at them. There's face-to-face communication. This is the most direct route to send and receive a message when you're face-to-face. There's also written communication. Now, written communication is the most effective way to document a message. There's also telephone communication. When we use telephone communication, it's the second most direct route to send and receive a message. Voicemail communication is effective when you don't need a written record. And then email communication is very effective when you do need to send a very short message.