Body Language

Body language is very important to show that you care for the person or not. Body language says it all even the tone of your voice. When a person comes to you and need your help, he/she wants you to understand their pain or give them advice. This is where you need your listening skills to help you with it. One of the examples of using a body language in these kind of situations are trying to hold their hand; thus you can understand the pain from there. Other than that is giving a long hug and holding him/her tightly stating that everything is going to be fine or I'm here for you. If he/she is crying, try to bring them somewhere where it is quiet and they have the whole day to express their feelings about the situation. There you need to listen attentively because he/she needs your advice from here. You need to give a soft voice because he/she has a lot of pain and having a soft tone voice will make he/she calmed. Eye contact is one of them to show that you are listening and it really helps you to actually listen to them.

Communication Through electronics

Communication through email, sms, facebook messages can be so misleading. Take this for example.

Hello!!!!!

The writer may mean it as exciting and you know. high energy Hello!!!

And reader may see it as.. Sarcastic Hello!!!! Like.. the Hello!! Come on! Think for yourself!! kind of hello.

There are so many ways one can interprete an email or sms or facebook message, so why do we use it then despite all the trouble we can get into. And without non-verbal cues, it is harder to explain something too. Don't believe. Try this exercise.

A simple picture is shown to u. Your task is to direct your friend (who hasn't seen and will not see the picture) to draw the picture on a piece of paper without using non-verbal cues. Means you can only talk. No body movement what so ever. In fact, it is best if you do this without seeing each other. Meaning your friend an only hear you. You are not allowed to see your friend's drawing till the end. The time given is 3 minutes.

That piece of art your friend did, would be your certificate as a communicator. How good or how well a communicator you are shows in that piece of drawing. And there you go.

Empathy

So empathize is to feel and experience the things the other party is feeling. And this helps in human communication.

A lot of times arguments and quarrels are formed because people fail to empathize. Empathy is a difficult thing to do. It is not natural for humans to do so because humans are generally very selfish. So if we put in effort and empathize accordingly, we should be able to feel and think like the other person and discuss a win-win situation for both parties.

But here's the glitch, empathy can be misused. Someone who is manipulative enough would appear sad and dishearten to you. And this person will tell you all their sad stories and you would probably believe it. The problem here is this person is making use of your empathy to trick you into believe that all these has happen. In actual fact, none of these happened but because you're such an empathetic person, you feeled for this person and trust this person!!

This is extremely dangerous when it comes to people who can really play the scene. They will probably say they are competent communicators by saying they have a range of personalities, and so they choose which is the best for the moment, and use it skillfully to communicate. Others will see it as manipulation. So how do we differentiated it. Hmm A moral dilemma

Relationships and Body Language

There are a lot of expressions showed using body language. To show you are interested or not interested with that person.

Here's a video about how to flirt using body language
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhU5QZPdZ70

Flirting is showing whether or not you are interested and feel comfortable showing it to that person.

The first step is eye contact. This shows how you are interested with a person without glaring or staring at them. Men usually have eye contact across the room for a short period of time, glance away and then look again for a second time. Body language also shows how you are interested by both of them facing each other. Ladies would usually cross their legs act interested in him.

The second step is the flipping or tossing their hair for the ladies. On the other hand, men tend to brush themselves off or adjusting the hair stating that he wants to look good for her.

The third is to lean towards your body. Men usually use the upper body to show their strengths and basically wants to act all cool and all.

The fourth is have slightly touching someone when you're talking to him/her. This also shows that that person is really interested with you and really listening what you're trying to say.

I think that all of these are right and usually happens here and there. I think that the second step is not always the hair. I know some girls usually like to hold their chain around their neck or something. I never thought that men would actually try to adjust their hair because that's usually a girl's thing hahaha. So I think that most of these are right and people actually use these kind of signals.

High Context Culture and Low Context Culture

High context culture - Culture which avoids direct use of language; meaning is conveyed through context more than words.
Generally low context means the opposite.

Here is what I think is a low context culture example (between 2 talkshow professionals, Oprah Winfrey and David Letterman):

Click here for the video. If it somehow defunct, look up by typing "Oprah" and "Letterman" together in the search box in Youtube.

So as you can see, they both tend to interrupt each other because of too much things to say at once. And the most importantly, even the slightest emotion and compliments were specified to the tiniest detail. With spoken words.People nowadays, asides from America and maybe other countries, I think they are not really high in context when it comes to communication. Above average is better when describing them.

Cultures with higher context would be countries with not many words in their original language. I think especially Japan fits into this criteria, where they have two sets of "alphabets" in their language: One for their own language and the other set is to imitate words that doesn't originate from their own country like "hamburger" or "bread". And on top of that they must use something more than those two sets of alphabets alone to convey what they want to say. Body language, or art, for example. And their fictional work like comics does not really say much in words but they do in faces and emotions. It's so different from low-context culture comics like let's say, American comics.

Here's an extract from a villian, Two-Face from Batman.
And here is something from a Japanese horror comic, Gyo by Ito Junji



Situations filled with emotions are filled with descriptions in the 1st comic extract but not in the second.


High-context leaves a lot of space for imagination while the opposite goes for low-context. Like the picture below which is full of empty spaces, and a poetry of few words with ambiguous meanings. Maybe they had to resort to doing ambiguous art because of limited materials. Is it rain? Is it misty? It is open for your imagination in this ancient work of art.


As for this page from Street Fighters VS King of Fighters (translated from Chinese) it's describing every single scene:



American's comics have gotten better nowadays though, with less description on how you feel and stuff.


In conclusion I think we have to stay balanced- in the middle of high and low contexts. It is not interesting to take out the spice of life by leaving no suspense at all, but yet it is also not a good thing to be too under-informed. Take your pick. I'm staying in the grey region and more towards the low context.


JWCD

PERSUASIVE SPEAKING

What do we mean by persuasive speaking?

Persuasive speaking urges us to do something. Informative speaking, on the other hand, reveals and clarifies options. Informative speakers teach. Persuasive speakers lead, evoke emotions and ask for audience commitment. Sometimes persuasive speeches are aimed at earning passive agreement, as in persuading an audience of the importance of some policy, value, or service. At other times, persuasive speeches aim for personal action, as in getting people to join an organization, buy a product or service, or support a cause.

Persuasive Speech Tips

• Gain attention and interest. Try a quote? Try humor(see below)? Shock or startle? ("Before this speech is finish, 5 recent students will have lost jobs in the new depression.") Try a direct question? ("What sort of internet addict are you?") Stress a key word or symbol? (Get dialog going on the symbolic meaning of the logo?)
• Try humor, depending on the overall purpose of the presentation. Old editions of Readers Digest are great sources since the material is clean and people will probably have forgotten the jokes.
• Establish your credibility early
• Demonstrate audience analysis and understanding. Make relevant, direct contact with audience - why does it matter?
• Preview main points? (an arguments can be made that solutions shouldn't emerge until at least half way through your speech in order to avoid having your position pre-judged)
• Create cognitive dissonance. Your audience must feel involved in the problem before they'll be moved to accept a solution
• Make effective transitions between ideas
• Demonstrate enthusiasm and/or passion
• Provoke thought through questions
• Construct a logical case with evidence in support of what you're trying to sell
• Avoid verbal fillers/disfluency
• Close with a memorable summary, perhaps request a specific act or action from the audience . Be declarative, maybe firm and demanding in your close.

Simplified version

Here are 10 tips for turning a good speech into a great one!

1. Have a plan and set some objectives & outcomes.

There is nothing worse than not knowing what you want to achieve. Do you want to educate the audience, inform, inspire, motivate or touch their emotions? Always work out what you want to achieve before beginning the speech process.

2. Have a formal structure - beginning, middle and end.

Audiences love structure and the best speeches stick to this tried and true rule. As they say: "tell them what you're going to say, tell them and then tell them again".

3. Avoid having too much content.

Hands up those that are guilty of this sin. I know I am. I have lost count the number of technical presentations given by CEO's, managers, scientists, engineers, geologists and other professionals who have just put too much content into their presentations. Far too much for an audience to absorb - remember even the best audiences face information overload after 20 minutes.
How do you overcome the content crisis? See Tip # 8.

4. Define who your audience is and use the most appropriate communication
channels to reach them.

Analyse how your audience likes to take in information - do they like to be visually stimulated or do they enjoy just sitting back and listening. Or do they like to get involved, to touch and feel in a kinaesthetic way. Work out the best mix of visual, audio and kinaesthetic and use this in your speechwriting.

5. Research your speech using a range of sources.

Be a keen observer of the trends your audience is likely to be interested in and keep a file of interesting articles and information. If you are time poor- a few quick questions when meeting an audience just prior to a speech, such as "what are the issues facing your business/industry/association at the moment?" can really help target your presentation and build rapport.

6. Use personal stories, examples and metaphors to make intangible concepts
tangible.

In many cases you are trying to sell ideas and concepts in a speech. These are intangible and often difficult for the audience to grasp. Personal stories, examples and metaphors make the invisible visible.

7. Have a strong opening and closing.

People remember the opening - first impressions count! The closing is important as it should reinforce the key message you want the audience to go away with in their head after they have heard the presentation. Ending with a 'call to action' can be a powerful way to get your audience to act on your message.

8. Add value and extra detail through a handout.

Here's a tip: if you want to provide detail - put it in a handout! You can get far more content across in the written form than in a speech. Always refer to this in your presentation but hand it out after your speech so the audience is not distracted reading through it while you talk. There is nothing more soul destroying for a presenter to see the audience leafing through written notes rather than looking at you!

9. Use short words and plain English.

The short words are always the best words. Avoid jargon. Use active words instead of passive. This has far more impact in the minds of your listeners.

10. Evaluate and review on a regular basis.

There's nothing more powerful than to hear back a speech you've written. If you are writing a speech for someone else always try and hear the speech or at least get some feedback. Recording and listening back to a presentation is the fastest way to improve your skills.

Methods of Persuasion
People have been trying to influence one another for a long time. Maybe one of the most articulate early speakers was the Greek Philosopher Aristotle. His ideas are as relevant today as they were when he was teaching at the Lyceum around 300 B.C. He thought there were basically three ways to influence people:

• Credibility -- "ethos". Sometimes we believe something simply because we trust the person telling us. You want to look like you know what you're talking about.
• Emotional appeal -- "pathos". Sometimes we do things because of a "gut feeling" or an appeal to our emotions, whether those of compassion or fear. Advertisers make great headway tweaking our concerns about what others might think about us.
• Rational appeal -- "logos". Providing good reasons is important. Providing evidence and reasoning are a strong part of the persuasive process.

Appealing to logic may be the hardest of the three sources of influence for the speaker to use. What's important here is the development of relevant "support material". Three types of support material commonly used include examples, statistics, and testimony.

Examples are useful in clarifying, reinforcing, or personalizing ideas. These could involve case studies or anecdotal examples &emdash; slices of life to prove the point. Ethically, you should help your audience gauge the credibility of your sources, the representativeness of examples and samples, etc. Using examples without other types of support material can come across as weak evidence.

Statistics can help. Combing them with examples can be powerful. Using too many statistics can be deadly. You should qualify the sample, translate the statistics that you use so the audience can understand fairly. Relevant visual display of statistics can be a powerful aid in making an argument.

Personal testimony can also provide dramatic support material. Testimony can give emotional life to the issues you're focusing on. You should of course quote or paraphrase accurately and fairly, identify and qualify the source's credentials.

A common pattern used in formulating persuasive speeches is called "Monroe's Motivated Sequence". Though particularly appropriate when you're seeking a commitment to personal action, the suggested sequence can provide good structural ideas for any sort of persuasive presentation. The five parts identified in the sequence below include: Attention, Need, Satisfaction, Visualization, Action; but only three main points. For fun, I'll illustrate the points around an appeal for MHR students to join and support PIHRA.

ATTENTION
In the Introduction…

A. A scenario of a recent graduate who cannot get hired to a position in Human Resources requiring "experience" and evidence of community involvement and leadership. Maybe in the form of a letter or quote from the student?

NEED:
I. Students seeking careers in HR often have a problem.

A. Every year many jobs are available, but require appropriate internship experiences as a bare minimum.
B. Only a small number of graduating seniors in MHR have career-oriented professional experience.

SATISFACTION:
II. If more students had solid internship experiences, professional success of graduates would be multiplied.

A. Involvement in PIHRA is a sound resume item in the eyes of employers.
B. PIHRA students meet monthly with regional professionals in order to develop networks and identify opportunities.

VISUALIZATION:
III. With an internship you'll be able to launch one of the most exciting careers that a young person in business can have.

A. Let's look again at the opening scenario and see if you can really afford to continue with the non-professional employment you have.
B. Statistics show that MHR graduates who prepare well launch professional careers, and that after about five years of on-the-job growth are prepared for major career steps.

ACTION:
In the conclusion…

Call to the audience to join PIHRA and share in helping to develop internship learning opportunities for MHR students.

FINALLY,

Persuasive speaking requires not only knowing technique but also principles. These tips and techniques will sound wonderful to the ear. However, to be effective in persuading, you will need to do much more. You will need to understand and be able to apply the principles.

Take fluency for example. If your speech lacks this one little quality, you will hinder your ability to persuade. This is a fundamental principle of good speech. All the other tips and tricks in the world will not compensate for a lack of fluency. In the Speaker Skills you will find the speech quality Fluency along with tips and techniques to help you improve in this speech quality.

The Challenge

Consider the listening styles of the audience. This adds yet another element that demands attention to enable you to give a persuasive speech. It's not tips and tricks that will help you. The challenge is understanding the human mind and meeting it's needs.

To be a persuasive speaker will also require you to challenge the traditional ways of presenting information. Most speech text books might encourage you to start with a story, an anecdote or even a joke. To truly master persuasive speaking, you will need to reevaluate these traditional ideas. They may not be the most effective for your audience.

Reference:

• http://www.csupomona.edu/~sciman/classes/324/organizer/persuaSpeech.html

• http://ezinearticles.com/?Ten-Speech-Tips-for-Writing-Powerful-and-Persuasive-Presentation&id=64706

• http://www.speechmastery.com/persuasive-speaking.html

Done by: ISHVERJIT SINGH

STAGES OF LISTENING

Listening in Interpersonal Communication Reviewing

This chapter focused on the nature of listening, the influence of culture and gender on listening, and the dimensions of listening that you need to consider for effective listening.

Stages of Listening
What is listening? What purposes does listening serve?

• Listening is an active process of receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating, and responding to communications.
• Listening enables you (1) to learn, to acquire information; (2) to relate, to help form and maintain relationships; (3) to influence, to have an effect on the attitudes and behaviors of others; (4) to play, to enjoy oneself; and (5) to help, to assist others.

Styles of Listening
What are your listening options?

• Empathic-objective listening refers to the extent to which you focus on feeling what the speaker is feeling.
• Nonjudgmental-critical listening refers to the extent to which you accept and support the speaker.
• Surface-depth listening refers to the extent to which you focus on the obvious surface meanings.
• Active-inactive listening refers to the extent to which you reflect back on what you think the speaker means in content and feeling.

Culture, Gender, and Listening
How is listening influenced by culture and gender?

• Members of different cultures vary on a number of communication dimensions that influence listening: speech and language, nonverbal behavioral differences, and preferences for direct and indirect styles of communication.
• Men and women may listen differently; generally, women give more specific listening cues to show they're listening than do men.

REFERENCE:

http://wps.ablongman.com/ab_devito_intrprsnl_10/0,7393,602970-,00.html


DONE BY: ISHVERJIT SINGH

HUMAN COMMUNICATION THEORY

In the late 1940s Claude Shannon, a research mathematician at Bell Telephone Laboratories, invented a mathematical theory of communication that gave the first systematic framework in which to optimally design telephone systems. The main questions motivating this were how to design telephone systems to carry the maximum amount of information and how to correct for distortions on the lines.

His ground-breaking approach introduced a simple abstraction of human communication, called the channel. Shannon's communication channel consisted of a sender (a source of information), a transmission medium (with noise and distortion), and a receiver (whose goal is to reconstruct the sender's messages).

In order to quantitatively analyze transmission through the channel he also introduced a measure of the amount of information in a message. To Shannon the amount of information is a measure of surprise and is closely related to the chance of one of several messages being transmitted. For Shannon a message is very informative if the chance of its occurrence is small. If, in contrast, a message is very predictable, then it has a small amount of information---one is not surprised to receive it.

To complete his quantitative analysis of the communication channel, Shannon introduced the entropy rate, a quantity that measured a source's information production rate and also a measure of the information carrying capacity, called the communication channel capacity.

He showed that if the entropy rate, the amount of information you wish to transmit, exceeds the channel capacity, then there were unavoidable and uncorrectable errors in the transmission. This is intuitive enough. What was truly surprising, though, is that he also showed that if the sender's entropy rate is below the channel capacity, then there is a way to encode the information so that it can be received without errors. This is true even if the channel distorts the message during transmission.

Shannon adapted his theory to analyze ordinary human (written) language. He showed that it is quite redundant, using more symbols and words than necessary to convey messages. Presumably, this redundancy is used by us to improve our ability to recognize messages reliably and to communicate different types of information.

In the study of complex systems today, we view deterministic chaotic processes as information sources and use Shannon's entropy rate, as adapted by Kolmogorov and his student Y. Sinai in the late 1950s, to measure how random a chaotic system is.

SIMPLIFIED VERSION:

Context

1. There are four kinds of communication contexts: physical (the environment where communication occurs); social/psychological (which includes the status of a relationship or the seriousness of the situation); temporal (the time of the interaction); and cultural (the backgrounds of the people communicating).

Sources and Receivers

2. When you speak to someone, you are the source of the message. When you listen to someone, you are the receiver. These two functions are not mutually exclusive, as we send and receive messages simultaneously in conversations.

Messages

3. We send messages both verbally and non verbally, and they can be transmitted from a combination of all of our senses.

Channels

4. Channels are the mediums used in communication, such as the telephone or chat room.

Noise

5. Noise is anything that prevents you from receiving a message. Noise can include thoughts that distract you or loud noises that make it difficult to hear.

Effects

6. There are effects to every communication act that we engage in. The effects can be cognitive (which changes our thinking); affective (which changes our feelings); or psycho motor (which affects bodily movements).

References:

• http://www.ehow.com/facts_5297430_human-communication-theory.html

• http://www.exploratorium.edu/complexity/CompLexicon/Shannon.html

DONE BY: ISHVERJIT SINGH

INTERVIEW TIPS

INTERVIEW TIPS


1) Enter into a state of relaxed concentration.

2) Plan ahead. Act spontaneous, but be well prepared.
Be your authentic self, professional yet real.

3) Set goals for the interview.

4) Know the question behind the question.

5) Follow up with an effective "thank you" letter. Don't write this letter lightly.

6) Consider the interviewer's agenda. Much is on the shoulders of the interviewer.

7) Role play.Expect to answer the question, "Tell me about yourself."
This is a pet question of prepared and even unprepared interviewers.

8) Watch those nonverbal clues.

9) Be smart about money questions.

10) Don't hang out your dirty laundry.




Things to remember:

1. First impression counts
2. Be on time.
3. Be positive.
4. Eye contact with the interview.
5. Be honest.

Small advice: NEVER GIVE UP.



References:

• http://jobs.asiabot.com/resources/top10interviewtips.shtml

• http://www.jobsdb.com/MY/EN/V6HTML/jobseeker/114_career.html

DONE BY: ISHVERJIT SINGH