Guest Post - Vidhi Shah

Vidhi is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here she writes about communication.

Once a blind man was sitting in a corner of a busy New York street and was begging for money. There was an empty cup in front of her and “I’m Blind – Please help” was written on it. Every minute atleast 30-35 people looked at the cup, read the line and passed by without giving a single penny. A sane man was observing this situation for an hour.Then he went near the cup, changed the tag on the cup and put the cup on its previous position. Suddenly, within a few hours people started feeling the cup with money and the cup was overflowing. The blind man asked the stranger what is written on the paper on cup and the stranger said “Today is beautiful. You can see it, but I can not!”

My mother told me this story when I was 13. The story was touching, but in true sense it demonstrated the power of effective communication and persuasion. The change of words persuaded the people to donate the money. However it is not this easy to persuade people today. One of the major factors to aid persuasion is Oral Communication. The victory speech in 2008 by President Obama comes to my mind when I think of persuasive speeches. I was in India but after listening to his words, I was convinced that he would get the United States out of recession. This is the power of oral communication. Being precise, logical and articulate can do wonders while communicating, especially at work place.

According to the study by Albert Mehrabian¹, there are 3 main elements of face-to-face communication. Only 7% of the communication happens by words while 38% by tone of the words and 55% by body language. The figures consolidate my stand on the importance of oral communications. When you have such a small proportion of communication through words, the challenge of conveying your thoughts effectively becomes even more daunting. The trick is that ‘it is more about what the audience wants to hear than about what you want to tell them’.

Today’s world requires that we be even more effective while communicating. Each of us would have suffered at least once due to ineffective communication. So how do we excel in an activity that is so important to be successful in life? The key is in making the first impression. We need to put ourselves in the listener’s shoes and treating each person individually. There is no blanket approach to communication. However once a good first impression is made, most of the words spoken would go into the 7% category stated earlier.

To conclude, effective oral communication can vary from being the most appropriate way to convince and persuade people to being the most difficult way to do the same.