Communication Basics

06/30/13: A large portion of our lives is spent communicating with others. Sharing your thoughts and understanding another person's feelings is an essential skill for functioning in any society in the world. It is no surprise then that difficulty with communication is the #1 issue that brings people to couples counseling, and is at the core of many other things that we struggle with. The following is a simple model of communication that can help illustrate how communicating with others really works, all the places it can go wrong, and what we can do to be better.Overview The picture below is a really simple map of how any type of communication works. The necessary pieces are a sender, a receiver, and a message. For human communication, each person has an added step of either coding or decoding a message. The two basic ways of coding messages are putting it in some kind of language (speech or writing) and/or nonverbally communicating it (body language, tone, etc). The receiver then interprets (decodes) the words and nonverbals, hoping to arrive at an understanding of what the sender really means. To put it all together, an example would be Person A notices she is hungry so she puts her hand on her stomach and says, "Wow, I'm getting huuuuuungry." Person B sees and hears this, and interprets it to mean that Person A is hungry. Simple right? Communication Problems The way we encode and decode messages is based on how we learned to communicate in earlier stages of life. Wit...
Source: Staff Psychologist - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Tags: Blog Source Type: blogs