The Essence And Significance Of Communication In Personal And Professional Relationships Is Essay-worthy.

Write an essay reflecting upon your own communication skills and experiences using examples from your personal and/or work life.

Marking Criteria:

Ability to reflect on the role of communication and its impact

Ability to recognise and reflect on own listening and talking styles and the impact on others

Ability to recognise and reflect on barriers to communication and how those make communication challenging
Suggestions provided for overcoming barriers to improve communication
Appropriate and relevant examples provided to illustrate points
Number and choice of appropriate references

Importance of Communication in Personal and Professional Relationships

The essay brings about the discussion on the communication, role, and importance of communication in the relationships. It may be described in context to the personal or professional relationships, and in any business organisations. Communication refers to the exchange of information, thoughts, and ideas from one person to another, an interaction between two individuals. It is a process through which meanings are perceived and an understanding is created between people at all the levels in an organisation. The manner in which a person talks, communicates or behave with others determines the effectiveness of communication and impact on relationships. The description is a reflective essay, which includes experiences or examples of the communication that influences personal and work life (Greenaway et al., 2015).

In my opinion, communication is vital for personal and professional life and relationships for an individual as it states about the transformation or exchange of information, ideas, and thoughts between individuals. Our communication skills are important in every aspect of life, for both personal and professional life. No matter what profession you have adopted, communication is the most component key to the success of work and work-life. A person is able to effectively communicate ensures that there are no disputes between those two persons, and will easily resolve differences among them. Thus, it is significant in both personal and professional life, as communication serves as the basis of interpersonal relationships and reduces the occurrence of misunderstandings. Communication does not only mean conveying one’s ideas, thoughts and feelings it means that one ensures that the meaning is understood by the other person in the same manner and sense as conveyed. As it is clear from the above discussion, that communication plays a vital role in human life, it also facilitates in maintain healthy relationships with people (Thrasher et al., 2016).

Communication is an integral part of human life, and one should understand that every individual is different in the way we perceive the world, and meanings of things around us. In personal life, we need to communicate about different concerns, and problems in our daily life with others. Similarly, we need to communicate in our professional life also to build healthy relationships, mutual confidence, and credibility with others. It is understood as only speaking and talking is not communication, but more it relates to the communication, which can take place in any form. It may be in written through words we can communicate our ideas, thoughts, and feelings to other person. It means it may be verbal or non-verbal communication, conveying the message is what communication is all about (Töytäri, Rajala & Alejandro, 2015).

Effective Communication Skills

Effective communication is required to develop and ensure the maintenance of positive relationships with people, at personal and professional grounds. Whether it be an intimate relationship such as with a partner, child, or a friend or a professional relationship with a co-worker, supervisor, or client, it is essential. One’s communication skills determine how you resolve a problem, or a conflict and the level of trust a person generates in a relationships. Lack of communication in relationships affect them in a number of ways, creating confusions or misunderstandings and development of poor communication patterns. Effective communication refers to the combination of the four skills set; it includes engaged listening, non-verbal communication, and managing stress in the moment, and asserting oneself in the respectful way. As in any relationship communication is the vital key through which every individual comes to an understanding about the other person and his or her thoughts clearly (Better health, 2018).

Business communication in professionals or in professional life leads to increased motivation and productivity of an individual in his/her personal as well as professional life. Motivated employees are an asset to every organisation; therefore, one must ensure effective communication in the organisation, amongst individuals and the management. Communication is the pathway to success in an organisation, business communication leads to effective social relationships that depend upon the effective and efficient exchange of information between two or more parties. To ensure the effectiveness of communication in personal or professional life, one must be an engaged listener, pay attention to the speaker, and understand to what is being told (Roshan, Warren & Carr, 2016).

Discussing and understanding the essence of communication in personal and professional relationships, it can be further described from examples of my own experience. It has been my personal experience, as i am working currently; communication is the utmost important thing for maintaining relationships with peers, seniors or the people at a higher position at the workplace. It was about the very first day I joined the organisation, I have good understanding about things, or the job I am pursuing which helped me in adjusting with the work place easily. Understanding the norms, rules, and conditions at the workplace is a first step to communicate effectively with the people at the workplace. One of the problems experienced by me is related to assertive communication, as I felt submissive in front of the people who were elder than me or have work experience of longer time. Some other examples may include the communication issues which usually occur in the modern organisations, with centralised decision-making as employees are not given right to participate (Moreno et al., 2015).

Communication in Business Organizations

Assertive behaviour or communication includes one to show some traits of self-respect while presenting one’s own viewpoints and interests. Other individuals misunderstood my assertive behaviour or communication pattern as aggression at the workplace. In context to the professional relationships or workplace, it has been considered that effective communication ensures the smooth functioning of the organisation, leading to healthy relationships in the present and future years. There are essentially five components of the effective communication, namely encoding, medium of transmission, decoding, and feedback and there are other two factors in this process, which are sender and receiver (Kashima, 2016).        

I believe that a person in his/her personal or professional life can ensure effective communication through implementing communication models or using effective communication models. These components include sender, and receiver, medium through which message is conveyed through the process, contextual factors, message itself, and feedback. A sender who sends the message through a medium, which can be via email, a telephone call, or a written letter depending on the nature and purpose of transfer of information. Message here refers to the object of information, or the thing which is communicated it may be a spoken, written, verbal or physical signals which carry some information to be delivered to the sender. The last step is obtaining the feedback from the receiver that may be positive or negative, which defines that whether the receiver has understood the meaning of the message or not. Thus, it states that following this process one ensures effective communication of the ideas, thoughts, and information with others in the personal as well as professional life (McMillan, 2016).

Barriers to communication are the most common issue or problem in today’s personal or professional relationships. It can be also stated that there are many reasons to why the interpersonal relationships fail. I have the opinion that communication in interpersonal relationships requires some skills, which may help a person in overcoming the barriers of communication. These skills consist of active listening, clarification and reflection, and these barriers of communication can occur at any stage in the process of communication.  Barriers may lead to the distortion of message, which leads to wastage of time, effort, or money in making things clear. There are some common barriers to effective communication that include, use of jargon, emotional barriers and taboos, lack of attention, interest, or distractions to the receiver (Patoko &Yazdanifard, 2014).

According to my opinion, other than the external barriers there are some barriers, which relates to the physical disabilities of the person such as hearing problem or difficulty in speech. There may be some language barriers that might lead to cultural differences between people, affecting the flow and effectiveness of communication (Connor et al., 2016).  Language and psychological barriers are some of the most important problem or issues in communication for an instance, when I remain in a negative mood or anger then my personal concerns affect everything. This in turn affects my behaviour, as I become unresponsive to the message or information given by the sender (Ellis & Beattie, 2017).

Examples of Communication in Personal and Professional Life

I believe the fact that despite the numerous barriers to effective communication, some of the recommendations/suggestions that can facilitate in overcoming those barriers. One should listen properly to the other person, and understand the meaning of the message. Being empathetic, and analysing and accepting people through their different perceptions, is one of the strategy to overcome the barriers of communication in interpersonal relationships. In my opinion, if a person values one’s interest and experiences in respect to the personal and professional relationships, then it will subsequently help person to reduce the impact of barriers in maintaining relationships.

To conclude the above discussion, in my opinion communication is found to be crucial to any relationship. One should keep an open mind and properly listen to the other person’s ideas, thought and information to ensure effective communication and healthy relationships with people. We need to talk, listen, act, and respond properly to ensure healthy communication so that it becomes easy to handle conflicts and problems in the personal and professional life. The above essay stated about the essence or significance of the communication in both personal and professional life, that communication is found to be the building blocks of any relationship. Hence, an individual in every stage of life must ensure effective communication with people and maintain healthy relationships with them.

References

Better health. (2018). Relationships and communication. Retrieved from: https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/relationships-and-communication

Connor, P., Harris, E., Guy, S., Fernando, J., Shank, D. B., Kurz, T. & Kashima, Y. (2016). Interpersonal communication about climate change: how messages change when communicated through simulated online social networks. Climatic change, 136(3-4), 463-476.

Ellis, A. W., & Beattie, G. (2017). The psychology of language and communication. United Kingdom: Routledge.

Greenaway, K. H., Wright, R. G., Willingham, J., Reynolds, K. J. & Haslam, S. A. (2015). Shared identity is key to effective communication. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(2), 171-182.

Kashima, Y. (2016). Cultural dynamics. Current opinion in psychology, 8, 93-97.

McMillan, J. (2016). Try living life and being non-verbal communication is everything in our world. Intellectual Disability Australasia, 37(2), 3.

Moreno, A., Navarro, C., Tench, R. & Zerfass, A. (2015). Does social media usage matter? An analysis of online practices and digital media perceptions of communication practitioners in Europe. Public Relations Review, 41(2), 242-253.

Organisational Behaviour. (2018). Different type of communication and channels. Retrieved from: https://open.lib.umn.edu/organizationalbehavior/chapter/8-4-different-types-of-communication-and-channels/

Patoko, N. & Yazdanifard, R. (2014). The impact of using many jargon words, while communicating with the organization employees. American Journal of Industrial and Business Management, 4(10), 567.

Roshan, M., Warren, M. & Carr, R. (2016). Understanding the use of social media by organisations for crisis communication. Computers in Human Behaviour, 63, 350-361.

Thrasher, J. F., Abad-Vivero, E. N., Huang, L., O'Connor, R. J., Hammond, D., Bansal-Travers, M. & Hardin, J. (2016). Interpersonal communication about pictorial health warnings on cigarette packages: Policy-related influences and relationships with smoking cessation attempts. Social Science & Medicine, 164, 141-149.

Töytäri, P., Rajala, R. & Alejandro, T. B. (2015). Organizational and institutional barriers to value-based pricing in industrial relationships. Industrial Marketing Management, 47, 53-64.