Communication is a skill that you can learn. It’s like riding a bicycle or typing. If you’re willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of every part of your life.

Brian Tracy

What do you know about: Communication skills?  

Communication is a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behaviour. Communicating is the basis of social life: we do it all the time and it can even seem quite trivial. In fact, that’s not quite the case.

It is an “interactive exchange between at least two participants, who have mutual intention and communicative awareness and who share a certain meaning on the basis of conventional symbolic and signaling systems established by the reference culture”. This definition is certainly complete, but complicated. We try to simplify it.

In order to communicate, two conditions must necessarily be met:

• There must be at least two subjects, one who produces a message and the other who receives it. This exchange can be direct or indirect.
• There must be a message to communicate, something “to say”. People must be able to understand the message, therefore have a shared code in common. The same language, for example.

Communication and language are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing.
Language is generally the verbal part of communication, a conventionally established mode of transmission of content.

In the interaction it is important to take into high consideration the return signal that I receive from the other, the feedback and that is: listening to the words and observing the facial expressions, the voice, the posture and the words, to verify if the my message has arrived.

WHO LISTENS establishes if the communication is effective, if they understood and what they understood of what we wanted to express, NOT WHO SPEAKS!

A “communicative act” consists of:

–sender: who sends the message
–receiver: to whom the message is intended
–message: what is communicated
–channel: the medium through which one communicates
–code: the way, the language with which one communicates
–context: the “place” in which one communicates