Page 9 - Effective Communication Skills by Dalton Kehoe

Effective Communication Skills

Scope:

s humans, we need to sustain relationships with others in order
to get what we think we need and want from life. To do this, we
Ause a collection of behaviors described as communication skills.
Although we use them every day in our lives, we are often unaware of how
they develop and function. This course provides a theoretical and practical
survey of the ideas behind, and the practices of, effective communication.

Our ¿rst goal is awareness. We begin to become aware of how face-to-
face talk really works by comparing our commonsense views of talk with
the fundamental models developed by communication researchers and
theorists over the past 60 years. We investigate the essential processes that
permit us to communicate—to understand and be understood by others—and
discover that many of these processes are so deeply learned that they operate
automatically in most situations.

The next step in our journey to awareness is to reveal the automatic and
hidden processes that inÀuence everyday talk, including our deep cultural

learning and the nonconscious part of the mind, where much of this learning
is stored. We then discuss how they affect our conscious mind while we’re in
conversation with ourselves or another person. It turns out that seeing what’s
real and right in front of us—and responding accordingly—is not as easy
as we think. Moreover, these processes don’t operate independently of each
other; they work through our sense of self. Instead of seeing the world the
way it is, we see it the way we are. This course explores how our unique and
conscious sense of self develops and how we evaluate and defend it, while it
shapes how we see, think, and feel about others. At the end of each lecture,
exercises are provided to help you become more conscious of these forces in
your talk and to help you deal with them to become a better communicator.

The second goal of this course is effective action in our daily talk. We take
an overview of the ideals of effective talk and learn to divide face-to-face
talk into three easily recognized modes: connect talk, which describes the

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