Communication- Adapt or die!

Over the past few years, I been traveling around the world experiencing the cultural differences, the language barrier and so on. And I will use one line from the movie "Moneyball", from Brad Pitt - "Adapt or die"!! 

It's true. Sometime when you move to a new environment, there's no way the environment will change for you, only adapting the environment can save you from struggling; therefore the first thing that I think it's important to point out and discuss based on my previous experience, is the importance of communication. 

Human communication can be divided into three major categories, which are shown below. The chart below is a self-created hierarchy chart on communication. 

Nonverbal communication are known as non-wording style of delivering the message, such as haptics, gesture, body language and facial expression. You can see this style of communication in baseball game where coach throws the sign to his players. 

Oral communication as known as verbal communication. As simple as what it says, it delivers the message throughout voice. When you watch the news on TV, the reporter is using Oral communication to report the news.

And the last is Written communication. It has changed largely due to the technology improvement over the years. It originally was pen and paper written down the message to be delivered, however, we can now use laptop or phone to type up the message on to computer system to deliver our message. An example of this is the daily newspaper. 

A good communication is that both people achieve delivering the message and receive the message, also with a level of understanding the message content. For example, the baseball coach throws the signal to his players and his players make the correct plays, this call a successful nonverbal communication. 

So how is communication important in our daily life? 

Let me give you a few examples that happened recently.

One of the example which happened in my volunteering hours was in a committee meeting, where I shared an idea that I would love to take charge of a sponsorship team, and asking if everyone in the committee agree on creating an extra team and also who would like to take part with me. During the speech for my idea, I saw most of the members were nodding their heads while eye focus on me, at that point, I knew that my message has been delivered to the members successfully. And with the feedback saying "yeah, I think that a good idea" and "Billy, I will help you in this project", I knew immediately that everyone had agreed with this idea. 

Another example that given here is a "Not so successful attempt" of using communication. 

I remember in one of the committee meeting. I wanted to remind our chairperson to discuss about one item, so I tried to tap the table lightly and tried to stretch my arm hoping that I will get his attention, but that didn't work so well. So I kept on trying with sending him a phone message with the message that I wanted to deliver, but he had his phone on silence, so that didn't work again. After that, I had my phone out on the table and tried to use my finger to tap the phone, hoping that he would turn to me and get the meaning of "look at the phone". 

However, that make it a third "Not so successful attempt"!!

In these two examples, you can clearly see the different style of communication being used and the end results of them. 

The first example was successful because my message was delivered with my personal voice, which is oral communication. On the other hand, the second examples didn't work so successful was because I couldn't get my receiver's attention by using nonverbal communication. 

However, I can be certain that you received my message on communication. And which style of communication am I using here?   

See you soon, Billy