Abhishek is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about oral communication.
One of my friends was recently blessed with a baby and he
was sharing his baby-sitting experiences with me. His daughter’s primary mode
of communication was crying, but it was pretty clear and straightforward. It
had an "angry cry", "hungry cry",
"irritated cry", "just for the heck of it cry", "I
want to sleep, but can't cry", "dad stop singing cry" and so on.
The baby hasn’t even reached an age where it can utter any word but has no
problem in communicating what she has in mind; neither do her parents have any
problem understanding her.
As young kids, we would have
went through similar phase where none of us had any problems in expressing our
feeling, anxieties, attitudes even before we could really understand the
language which people around us spoke. But as grown ups we hear numerous
instances where businesses fail, teams fail, projects fail because of
communication issues. Surveys [1]
indicate that more than 50% of the IT projects fail because of lack of
effective communication amongst the people involved. Its ironic that these
teams or project which involve adults who are well qualified, experienced more
importantly have powerful channels such as a language to communicate fail to do
so, but the same set of people did not have any such issues in their younger
days.
I was always puzzled and curious to understand this irony.
In CMU I had the opportunity to interact with diversified group of
International students coming from different countries. Especially among Non
native English speakers, I see that English language is a barrier rather than a
means for their communication. I was curious to understand how many of us could
communicate so effectively in our younger days where we could hardly speak any
language. That was when I came across Professor Albert Mehrabian’s
communication model[2]. According to this study a
staggering 55% of the communication takes place through non verbally means such
as facial expressions, gestures etc., 38% of a message is communicated through
paralinguistic ways such as tone of our voice, pitch, the confidence in our
expression and meager 7% of the communication takes place through the words
that are spoken. Further more Professor Labash’s class added more things to my learning
of effective communication. The Essential elements of a effective communication
is the passion with which we speak, the tone, facial expression, eye contact
persuasiveness, gestures etc. These non-verbal elements are the vital parts for
an effective oral communication. From this I could clearly build an AHA picture
why young people do not have many constraints to communicate than grown ups do.
As Young people we efficiently used these visual, non verbal, paralinguistic
ways to communicate, but as adults we tend to focus more on the verbal modes of
the communication and try to overemphasize the importance of words in
communication.
Now that we know the importance of non-verbal elements such as
confidence, the gestures etc. in oral communication, I was doing some thinking how
we naturally made use of them in our younger days while as adults, many a times
we fail to do so. I was trying to draw some personal experiences where I was
very effective in communicating my thoughts. One such instance was during my
undergraduate days where I was trying to sell some college fest tickets to my
fellow students. I turned out to be very good sales person and I could sell a
fair chunk of the tickets. Now, I analyzed what made me so effective in that
job back then, I realize that primarily I was very excited about the fest and
the events that were happening in the fest. In the first place I was convinced that
this is a type event that I as a student would like to attend and it was easier
for me to convince my fellow students to do so. Studies [3]have
shown that confidence, gestures, and many of non-verbal elements comes
naturally when a person truly believes in what he says. I could certainly tell
from my ticket selling experience that those gestures, the energy, the passion
came naturally to me because I was convinced about the event. From this I could
more effectively persuade others to buy tickets. After selling a few tickets it
was much easier for me to convince students because I had ‘social proof’ many
of their friends were attending this event and this made them buy tickets. Apart
from this there were a few tactical things that I made use to sell more
tickets. As ticket sales picked up I started announcing that tickets are NOT
going to last forever and people had few for minutes to buy them. The scarcity
created, persuaded more people to buy tickets immediately.
Professor Labash’s class on
communication reinforced my experiences that ‘Scarcity’, ‘Social Proof’ are essential
elements in persuasion. Further more I learnt that communication is more
persuasive when the listener likes a person, when the speaker has ‘Authority’ in that context etc.
To conclude, I would say that each of us are born with natural ability to
communicate through non verbal means and for quite some time this was our only
means of communication. Just like a infant which communicates its feeling
without even using channels such as language, these non verbal modes of
communication would come naturally when we are personally convinced about
anything we want to communicate. As a speaker, we should effectively make use
of these natural instincts in our oral communication. Apart from this there are
many elements which make our speech more persuasive and we need to be aware of
them at least till it comes naturally to us. Lastly I would like to say that as
important it is to be effective speaker it is also important to be effective
listener. Communication is a two a
channel consisting of listening and speaking and it can only effective when we develop good
listening skills along with speaking skills.
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