The Effective Communication Concept - Essay Example

Intro: The development skills was interesting and useful. The reason is that we could improve our communication and learn how we to deal with different cultures. It was in this class that I learned how to work in a team made up of many different cultures. Effective communication can reduce potential conflict between team members, especially when they come from different cultural backgrounds. Also, this course motivated me to be open-minded and accept the ideas of others. This helped me to look at issues from different perspectives. Working with a diverse team can produce greater results due to the fact that many ideas are shared. Moreover, this course helped me to enhance my listening skills so that I can be active listener. First Session: By looking at others and presenting a friendly face, the journey of effective communication and development skills can begin. The effective communication concept is considered the key to working in a team or group. There are many ways that I can improve my listening and reactions to others. I believe that effective communication includes body language, listening, and talking or responding. The coordinator of the course, Mrs. Deborah, gave us some instructions and requirements in order to complete this course successfully. Mrs. Catherine started talking about learning styles and how each style has specific characteristics. For instance, according to the HayGroup website, my learning style is the diverger style. This stylewhich combines tangible experience and reflects the observations of the person. I think that this style is correct for me because I am a logical person and like to deal with concrete concepts, such as numbers and materials. Also, I usually depend on my experiences and background to analyze some cases. The instructor attempted to let every student understand his or her style and then move on to expand his or her learning style by overcoming weaknesses or shortages. For instance, I have to expand my learning style by improving my listening skills, particularly when it comes to different ideas, and accept new models of analysis. Mrs. Catherine motivated us to increase our ability to gain greater knowledge and also to keep searching for new information. A learning style is something can differ from one person to another. It depends on the nature of the person and his or her values. Each learning style has a framework, starting from experience to application, and each learning style has its own strengths and weaknesses. In this class I looked forward to understanding myself so I could improve my weaknesses and maintain my strengths. Second Session: How can students set their goals with regard to applying some actions? The teacher began the class with this questiontrainer started the class. Any goal must be measurable and achievable. Mrs. Catherine showed the processes of setting goals. I believe in that everyone should set goals for their life and seek to achieve them. I could not imagine myself just studying for the sake of it. I have strong emotions toward my family. I study for them. I want helping my old man, who waits for me to come back home each day. I remember when my father asked me when I would finish my study. These words made me work harder and motivated me to give it my best. My goal is to help my family and support my father. I have not thought too much of what that would look like in the future, but I’m sure that graduating from school will open many doors for me. Mrs. Catherine talked about some points relating to goals, which are actions and measurements of success. What are the actions I have to do to accomplish my goal and how I can determine if I succeed or not? She emphasized the actions of any goal and what the best process to achieve the goals is. Also, she discussed the criteria of measurement or the benchmark of success in achieving goals. We practiced some processes of how to pick the objective, the action to reach the target, and how to measure performance. Third Session: This class was related to culture and values. As I know, having different cultures in one group can lead to conflict and misunderstanding between the team members. For me, this is normal due to different backgrounds and perspectives of each culture toward some issues. The main question was how can we solve any potential conflict stemming from a difference in culture? First of all, we have to understand the framework of different cultures and how each culture has specific values. Mrs. Anita mentioned this and explained how we can mitigate the conflict by understanding the different values of other people. There are two different kinds of values: extrinsic and intrinsic values. Extrinsic values are clear or tangible for others, such as dress, food, and language. These kinds of values are considered easy to deal with. On the other hand, intrinsic values are intangible and cannot be seen, such as faith, norms, and perceptions. Mrs. Anita explained the values and showed the iceberg of values to be clear for all. We have to be patient when we work with others and respect their values. For instance, in Islamic culture women wear scarves. In western culture, the Gregorian date is used, unlike in Islam, which uses the Hijri date. No one can impose his or her way of thinking on others;but we have to share ideas and reach a settlement. In saying that, multicultural societies have the ability to achieve greater progress in all aspects of life more so than closed societies. Fourth Session: In this class the trainer focused on communication skills and how we can improve them, specially listening skills. I love listening to others when they share their ideas, but I do not know what my listening approach was like. At the same time, I do not like give judgments directly to the talker; I like to leave him or her to finish talking, especially when he or she is complaining about something. Talking and listening are vitally important for the human race. electrical circle of motion must be attractive for the parties or will be useless. Before giving any judgment of the talker, the listener must first collect the information and interpret and evaluate it. Finally, we have to use the "I" statement and avoid the "you" statement when facing an issue or problem with someone. Fifth Session: Coaching wass the main point of this class, specifically how we can apply the coaching approach. The best way to give an answer to the talker is by using the "what" form. The "what" form may lead the talker to discover the answer without outside help. The coaching approach is a method of teaching that is usefuland very useful manner to when trying to learn by oneself. The coaching approach depends on asking questions to open the door for the talker to find the solution. Finally, this class was also an extension to the communication skills class. Sixth Session: great and I like a coach who has specific traits. A coach must have the ability to motivate others with a special charisma. The coach must encourage his or her team members through many different ways. The trainer showed four ways of encouragement: recognition, language, trust, and focused time. Moreover, I think that motivation through using intrinsic values, such as acknowledgement, praise, and compliments, has a greater effect than extrinsic values, such as rewards. encourages the coachee to get the best result or outcome from them. The coach approach can be changed to match the cultural shift. For instance, the coach is shifting from making a person supporting his or her strengths, from telling to listening and asking, and from a hierarchical structure to a collaborative structure. Finally, the coach plays a vital role in helping team members achieve their objectives. Seventh Session: In this class we discussed two kinds of listening: active and passive listening. Each kind of listening has specific characteristics. To be active listener you have to avoid asking questions, giving suggestions, and interrupting the talker. I need to improve my listening to be and become an active listener. In my culture we are used to talking at the same time and we do not give the talker a chance to finish speaking. The trainer showed us some examples for active and passive listening so we could understand the difference. Effective listening is important for the sender and receiver of the message. Finally, we did exercises with some of our classmates to evaluate each other on our listening skills. Eighth Session: The last class of this module was interesting. The main point was about critical thinking and its meaning. Critical thinking is a deep analysis and looks at an issue from different perspectives. I believe that critical thinking can be natural in some people and developed in others. Some people have this kind of thinking and they are able to improve it but some others do not have it. Also, critical thinking does not mean you can analyze anything that is false. Critical thinking means you have ability to analyze any topic in your field. The trainer asked us to do some practice about critical thinking and how each group can be convincing. Finally, by playing this game we finished the journey of development skills for Module Two. Conclusion: These sessions were very helpful for all students. There were many different topics and the trainers added more value in this course. Setting a specific goal, strategy of implementation, and criteria of measurement were mainfor other topics. Also, developing communication skills and understanding the values of other cultures were the key points. Through this course I did many assignments that were useful in enhancing my critical thinking skills and improving my writingskills. Read More