Communication

Communication is hard. I feel like everyone might be talking about this, because it was the most memorable part of the lecture. However, throughout this week that thought has particularly stood out to me. I've always thought that communication was hard and known that I'm not fantastic at it, however I never really thought about why it was hard till this week.

This week, I felt like I had an unusually difficult time communicating with the people around me. Which was ironic because I had just listened to the lecture about good communication. I felt like I couldn't get people to listen to what I was saying, understand my points and be cooperative. And all week, all I could think was why is communication so hard. So then I started to think about what I must be doing wrong and what I need to change to communicate better.

First, I realized that standing by yourself is hard. One person trying to communicate to a large group can be really frustrating. However, if you can even have just one person to back you up it becomes easier. When I tried to persuade people to do the things I wanted or listen to my ideas I started trying to find at least one other person to be outspoken with me. I found that if someone else was vocalizing the same thing as me it became a lot more powerful.

The second point I focused on was trust. I generally think that most people trust me. This week, however, I found out there was a couple people that didn't. It wasn't that I had done anything specifically to lose their trust, I just hadn't gained it yet. So, this week I also tried to form closer bounds of trust with people. I think that if people don't trust you they won't listen to your ideas and you can't communicate with them. So to be an effective leader you have to be trustworthy and that's one of the things I'm now trying to work on.

Finally, I think that largest part about why communication was so hard for me this week was optimism. I wasn't having a fantastic week and that meant that I also wasn't in a fantastic mood. People like to be around optimistic people, because feelings are contagious. I realized that my feelings this week were less than optimistic. I was communicating a bad attitude. Another part of communication is body language and I realize now that my body language was sending all the wrong signals. I realized that if I wanted people to listen to me I needed to be optimistic, because otherwise people weren't gonna want to be around me as much.

In all, I think I learned a lot more about communication that I thought I would this week. Having a bad week with communication really engrained the subject into my mind and now I think that I'm going to be able to be a more effective communicator or at least try to be. Because as John Powell said "Communication works for those who work at it".