 You may be wondering, why do I need to hear about communication or learn about communication? Isn't it all just common sense? Well, as the French philosopher Voltaire pointed out, common sense is not so common. Have you ever had a situation where there's been a miscommunication or a time when you and the other person just couldn't seem to get on the same page? No matter what your professional field or your personal circumstances, communication will undoubtedly be an important factor for success. And so for that reason, we're going to start our discussion by defining communication and narrowing down exactly what we mean when we say communication. What does that mean? So communication is the process of sending and receiving symbols to establish mutual understanding and shared meaning. So there's kind of a lot here and there's a lot of words and phrases. I want to break this down a little bit and take a look at each of the constituent parts. Let's start with the fact that communication is a process. There is a specific process that takes place and there's a whole other video of mine that you can check out if you want to learn more about that process. But there are specific elements that are always involved in the communication process. That doesn't mean it happens the same way every time. In fact, each one of those elements is actually a variable with all kinds of different possibilities within it. But there is a specific process. It starts with communicator A who has a message to send. That message goes through a channel. The channel is used to communicate with communicator B. Communicator B then offers feedback and then we also have noise and context that we throw in there. Those different elements make up the process of communication, but it is a very specific process that takes place and can be defined. So it is something that we can observe and take note of and adjust those different variables. Again, there's a whole other video on just the communication process. I encourage you to check it out. The link will be in the information down below. Communication is also about sending and receiving symbols, which is why when I just described it and when you watch that video on the communication process, you'll see that we call them communicator A and communicator B. And that's because traditionally they've been called the sender and receiver, but in fact both parties on both sides, whether it's one person or many people, are both sending and receiving at the same time. It's not just one or the other. This is a two-way process. We send and receive both as a part of the communication process. So it's the process of sending and receiving, and we are sending and receiving symbols, right? So we're sending and receiving symbols, but not like this, right? That's a different kind of symbol and spelled differently. I understand that. There's a little professor joke there. So we're sending and receiving symbols of all kinds. So for example, it may be words or it may be characters that we use, like arrows and the at symbol or the hashtag or whatever. These are all symbolic, right? They represent different things. And we'll get into that in a little more detail in another lecture as well, another video as well. But they are representative of something that the sender and receiver are trying to communicate. So we use symbols like words and characters and even nonverbal expressions to express ideas and express emotions and things, and they are representative of what we are trying to communicate. So we communicate using symbols. So communication is the process of sending and receiving symbols. For what purpose then? The purpose is to establish mutual understanding and shared meaning. Ultimately, that's what we're driving toward. We use these symbols to try and get on the same page. That's the whole idea is that we can be on the same page. It's the other person that they understand, would have an understanding of what it is we're trying to communicate. And that happens through shared meaning of these symbols. As we'll talk about again in another video, we're just laying a foundation here, but in another video we'll talk more about how language is symbolic and that kind of stuff. And it really comes down to shared meaning. But just for a quick example, if we looked at this gorgeous animal here, all of us would say in English we would call that a cow, right? It's a cow. It's a specific kind of cow. We could get into all that, the breeding and things, but it's a cow. And we spell cow C-O-W. And when we look at that, we don't say, hey, that's a fork or that's a barn or that's a car or whatever. We say that's a cow because that's what we've decided to call it as a society. In English, now they have different words for it. In different languages, of course, right? So we're just talking about English here, calling it a cow, but that's that shared meaning and mutual understanding of and illustrating the fact that language is symbolic, right? Why do we call it a cow? I don't know. Somebody decided that. And why do we spell it that way? Because somebody decided and that spread enough that it caught on. And so we have this mutual understanding. When somebody says cow or somebody writes the word C-O-W, uses those letters in a row, that this is what they mean, that this is what they're talking about. So we have that shared meaning and that gets us on the same page. If we're speaking the same language, it's a whole other topic, right? So overall, then, now we know that communication is the process of sending and receiving symbols to establish mutual understanding and shared meaning. There's a lot of different variables within this, a lot of different factors that we can adjust in ways that we can become a more competent communicator. And all of that are things we're going to explore in the rest of this video series on communication. And so, but just wanted to lay a foundation for what is it that we mean when we say communication and why it's important that we study this because we all have areas to improve in here. If you have questions about this definition of communication or what we mean by communication or anything along those lines, I would encourage you to email me. I would love to hear from you via email. In the meantime, I hope that you will begin to see communication as more than just common sense, but as a process that can be developed, can be learned and with a lot of variables in it that we can adjust to become more competent communicators.