Good Communication Skills - Key to Any Success

Good communication skills are key to success in life, work and relationships. Without effective communication, a message can turn into error, misunderstanding, frustration, or even disaster by being misinterpreted or poorly delivered.

Communication is the process by which we exchange information between individuals or groups of people. It is a process where we try as clearly and accurately as we can, to convey our thoughts, intentions and objectives.

Communication is successful only when both the sender and the receiver understand the same information.

In today's highly informational and technological environment it has become increasingly important to have good communication skills.

While many individuals still continue to struggle, the inability to communicate effectively will hold them back not only in their careers, but in social and personal relationships.  

steps for acquiring good communication skills:

1. Know what you want to say and why. Understand clearly the purpose and intent of your message. Know to whom you are communicating and why. Consider any barriers you may encounter such as cultural differences or situational circumstances (gender, age, or economic biases). Ask yourself what outcome you want to achieve and the impression you want to leave.

2. How will you say it? We're all aware by now, that it's not always what you say, but how you say it that counts. Begin by making eye contact. You inspire trust and confidence when you look a person in the eyes when you speak. Second, be aware of your body language since it can say as much, or more, than your words.

By standing with arms easily at your side you tell others that you are approachable and open to hearing what they have to say. If instead, your arms are crossed and shoulders hunched, it suggests disinterest or unwillingness to communicate.

Good posture and an approachable stance help make even difficult communication flow more smoothly. Make sure you speak in a cooperative, non-adversarial tone. Be nonjudgmental.

3 Listen. Communication is a two way street. After you've said what you have to say, stop, listen, and look for feedback and clues of comprehension. While the person is responding avoid any impulses to cut them off or listen only for the end of the sentence so that you can blurt out more ideas or thoughts that come to your mind.

Respectfully give them your full attention. When they are finished, to ensure that your message has been clearly and correctly understood, ask open questions and encourage discussion. Fine-tune your message if necessary.

4. Reach understanding, agreement or consensus. Once you have had the opportunity to discuss your message and the feedback to it, re-visit the purpose of the interchange. Have you reached common ground, solved a problem, or clarified your position? If the purpose was to teach or instruct, have you accomplished your goal? To communicate well is to understand and be understood.

Make sure that your message has been received as intended and that any questions or concerns have been alleviated. You can even agree to disagree.

There are no guarantees that your communication efforts will be meet with total compliance and agreement. As long as you understand each other, are cordial and respectful, you can still have a successful exchange.

More Tips for Developing Good Communication Skills

• To obtain a better command of the English language (or any other language), expand your vocabulary by reading and writing more. Look up words you're not familiar with. The better you are able to express yourself, the better your ability to communicate.


• Practice your listening skills. Be considerate of other speakers by waiting until they are done before stating your views. Process what has being said before responding.


• Learn to understand and appreciate opposing points of view by being open-minded and making an effort to see things from another's perspective. It will in turn, gain you more cooperation and understanding.


• Avoid trying to communicate when in an emotional state. You lose objectivity and may say something inappropriate or regrettable. Take time to think your position through before speaking.


• Join an organization such as Toastmasters that encourages you to develop a variety of communication skills as well as allowing you the opportunity to meet new and interesting people.

When you take the time to acquire and hone good communication skills you open yourself up to better relationships, more career opportunities, and increased self-confidence.

Moreover, you reach higher levels of mutual understanding and cooperation while successfully attaining your goals.

All new skills take time to refine, however, with effort and practice you can develop good, even exceptional, communication skills. 

Examination System

Examination are a necessary evil. It is quite understandable that whenever we put in hard work to make successful and venture, we wait for some time to see or guess the results that might’s have been achieved or might possibly be achieved. It is in this context that examinations become unavoidable. Though methods and yardsticks employed may differ and that even widely.

A student studies the whole year and then needs to be examined. It is even in the interest of the students himself or herself to know where he or she stands and how far his or her efforts have borne fruit.

However, the examination system as we have today becomes a farce in essence. It is because of many reasons and factors. The most distressing among these factors is the menace of copying. The students who may be dullards but can manage to indulge in large-scale copying get high marks, whereas the really meritorious students who    have worked hard get low marks.

Even otherwise , the prevalent examination system encourages cramming. Those who have a good memory or can indulge. In cramming, steal a march over others who cannot do this. Then, it is extremely painful to all lovers  of transparency that sometimes even the question papers are sold in the market a day or so before an examination.

Some efforts have been made to bring reforms in the examination such as the introduction of gradation system, the setting of a number of different question papers. Objective questions , etc. but much still remains to be desired and done.

THE HIGH COST OF VANITY IN 21st CENTURY

A well-known principle of social psychology, social comparison theoryproposes that we are constantly evaluating ourselves in relation to other people. In downward social comparison, you make yourself feel better by viewing yourself as more fortunate than others. The converse process also applies. In upward social comparison, you feel far worse about yourself if you see (or believe) that someone is outdoing you. Downward social comparison is a great coping process because it allows you to view a bad situation by looking at others who are worse off than you (poorer, less attractive, more stressed) and concluding that things aren’t really so bad. Upward social comparison can cause you to berate yourself unnecessarily because you feel that you’re being outdone by your friends, relatives, co-workers, or perhaps your Facebook friends.People 

Workman and Lee believed that social comparison is involved in the processes that lead us to empty our wallets for consumer goods that carry with them recognizable, expensive, labels. From sunglasses to sneakers, little symbols signify their price and, for many of us, our value as human beings. The smart shopper knows how to find these status symbols at bargain prices. The very savviest may still prefer to shell out the full amounts in order to be the first among their social circle to be wearing the latest models. However, as you'll see shortly, people often dress to impress themselves, propping their self-concept up by feeding their need to look attractive and successful.

Your desire to have recognizable brand names, or “brand sensitivity,” means that brand names are important to you in the process of making purchasing decisions. You may be highly brand sensitive, however, without knowing it. Through unconscious conditioning, you’ve come to associate certain brands with certain attributes, a factor that plays heavily into celebrity marketing.  When movie stars show up in ads for a particular cosmetic, line of clothing, or even underwear, you’ll be drawn toward those products because you form positive associations with the brand and the person. 

Not everyone is equally tempted by Ralph Lauren or Prada seals of approval, no matter who is modeling them. According to Workman and Lee, it should only be the most vain among us who are the most likely to stroll the fashion boutiques. There are 2 basic categories of vanity: physical appearance and the achievement of success. Fashion models and athletes are vain in the sense of wanting to be attractive.  People who purchase expensive products are vain in the sense of wanting to look successful. There are two subtypes within each type of vanity: being preoccupied with appearance or success vs. seeing yourself as more attractive or successful than you are.  

The kind of social comparison process that Workman and Lee believed to be important in consumer decisions involves the thoughts and feelings you have about how much more attractive or successful you are than others. People high in private self-consciousness tend to be self-reflective and introspective. If you’re high in private self-consciousness, for example, you would agree with the statement “I think about myself a lot.”

Workman and Lee reason that both vanity and private self-consciousness involve egocentrism, or the tendency to regard yourself as the center of the universe. If you’re always thinking about your own thoughts and feelings, it’s natural that you’ll develop a preoccupation with yourself and, hence, an excessive concern with your appearance and accomplishments.

Vanity is considered to stem from pride, which is one of the 7 deadly sins. People don’t like to admit that they’re vain. In fact, the vainest among us are probably the least likely to admit it. The fact that the participants in the Workman and Lee study owned up to their own self-preoccupation is impressive, supporting the widespread tendency of advertisers to use brand-name manipulation in the market place.  

If your vanity takes the form of being preoccupied with achievement, you’ll constantly seek expensive labels to prove your own worth and success. If it's your physical appearance you focus on, you’ll be lured by fancy clothes because you think they'll make you look better. The physically vain woman won’t want to pull out a drug-store lipstick in front of others to retouch her makeup; she’ll prefer to reach for the shiny gold department store variety costing 3 or 4 times as much. The color may be exactly the same, but it’s the glamour of the tube that matters most to her.

Oddly enough, many of the high-end goods that we wear can’t be seen by anyone else. No one knows whether you’re wearing Hanes or Calvin Klein’s under those designer jeans.  It probably doesn’t matter to too many people, including your romantic partners, whether the sheets on your bed come from Target or from Bloomingdale’s. Therefore, when we shell out the extra cash for what goes under our clothes, or over our mattresses, we may be succumbing to the pull that vanity has over our sensibilities.

Extrapolating somewhat from the Workman and Lee study, it’s possible to understand vanity as a variant of the unhealthy form of narcissism.  In vulnerable narcissism, people are constantly seeking ways to feel more important, attractive, and successful as a means of compensating for their inner feelings of weakness and inferiority.  Equating designer goods with personal value feeds into the worst kind of narcissistic vulnerability.

The take-home message is that it’s worth taking stock of your own motivations before you make your next sizeable purchase of a brand-name item. Who are you trying to please? Do you feel that you need to look better than other people, and that’s why you need that validation of your worth? Is it part of a larger pattern in which you think you’re better-looking than everyone else and “deserve” to treat yourself? It’s possible that the high-priced item is of better quality, and that your investment will prove worth the financial sacrifice. However, by understanding your own motivations, your budget and your self-image can both benefit. 

IF I WERE YOU -CBSE CLASS IX

Q. What has the intruder heard about Gerrard?
A. The intruder only knows gerrard by his name. he does not know that he is a playwright. Also he is the owner of the house.he only knows that he lives in the wilds of Essex. Also he is a kind of mysteryman. Not many people know abot him

Q. Who is the intruder and what kind of man he is?
A. The intruder is a criminal. Also he has killed a policeman. The police is chasing him. He wants to live as Gerrard after killing him.

Q. How does the intruder threaten Gerrard ?
A. The intruder threatens Gerrard that he would soon stop being smart. He would make gerrard crawl. He wants to know a few things.

Q. Why does the intruder want to kill gerrard? How does Gerrard befool the intruder with his false story?
A. Gerrard tells the intruder that one of  his men  had been caught. The things which should have been burnt have been found. So, due to that he expected trouble that night. That’s why, he wanted to clear off at the earliest. 

ANSWERS OF THE TEXT BOOK

Q. “At last a sympathetic audience.”
(i) Who says this?
A. Gerrard says this.

(ii) Why does he say it?
A. He says it because the intruder shows some sympathy towards him.

(iii) Is he sarcastic or serious?
Ans : He is sarcastic.

Q. Why does the intruder choose Gerrard as the man whose identity he wants
to take on?                 
A. The intruder chooses Gerrard because he finds him closely similar to him. If he wears clothes like Gerrard does, no one knows that they are two persons.

Q. “I said it with bullets.”
(i) Who says this?
A. Gerrard says this.

(ii) What does it mean?
A. He is very dangerous person.

(iii) Is it the truth? What is the speaker’s reason for saying this?
A. It is not the truth. He says so to make the intruder change his mind.

Q. What is Gerrard’s profession? Quote the parts of the play that support your
answer.
A. Gerrard is a playwright by profession. The supporting words are, : “sorry I can’t let you have the props in time for rehearsal……..’

Q. “You’ll soon stop being smart.”
(i) Who says this?
A. The intruder says this.

(ii) Why does the speaker say it?
A. The speaker says it because Gerrard hasn’t frlt any fear so far though he has a gun in his hand.

(iii) What according to the speaker will stop Gerrard from being smart?
A. Gerrard would stop being smart after being hit by one of his bullets.

Q. “They can’t hang me twice.”
(i) Who says this?
A. The intruder says this.

(ii) Why does the speaker say it?        
A. Because he has already committed a murder. The penalty of death can’t be given to him twice.

7. “A mystery I propose to explain.” What is the mystery the speaker proposes to explain?
A. Gerrard says this. The mystery is about Gerrard’s telephoning his orders. Then he would be suddenly disappearing, but again coming back. The intruder wants to do very things like Gerrard does.

8. “This is your big surprise.”
(i) Where has this been said in the play?
A. This has been said in the play when Gerrard tells the intruder not to shoot him. If he shoots him he’d hang if not as himself then as V.C.Gerrard.

(ii) What is the surprise?
A. The big surprise is that the intruder won’t kill him. Gerrard is right in saying this.

NO MEN ARE FOREIGN - JAMES KIRKUP

SHORT QUESTIONS

Q:  Why is war’s long winter starved?
A: Due to war there is everything short in supply. So people suffer or die in war times.

Q:  Explain ‘in their lines we need…’?
A: It means the lines of luck that astrologers read in ones palm.

Q: What is that force that can win over other’s strength? 
A: It is ‘love’.

Q: What can be recognized and understood?A: Common life can be recognized and understood.

Q: What shall happen if we hate our brother’s?A: If we hate our brothers we shall deprive ourselves of what we are. This will mean self-betrayal or self-condemnation.

Q: What shall happen to the earth?A: the earth shall be defiled.

Q: When do we defile the earth?A: When we take arms against each other. We defile the earth.

Q: How is the air? How is it insulted?
A: It is full of innocence. It is insulted when there occur wars or hatred controls the mind of the people.

Q: What should we remember? 
A: We should remember that no men are foreign and no countries strange.