Goals of Tools for Communication
In Tools for Communication you will be exploring the components of effective communication. They are reflective listening, identifying nonverbal cues, responding with understanding and using effective problem solving techniques.This short book is a “how to” book to assist you to identify what are “normal” techniques of communication to increase your personal effectiveness at home, at work, in the community, in relationships, and with yourself. You will gain more from this book if you use the skills within on a daily basis and are faithful in your daily journal writing. Opening up yourself to your feelings and the feelings of others requires practice, practice, practice. Read and re-read these sections and work and re-work the exercises until you master the "feelings oriented" approach to effective communication.
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Prologue to Tools for Communication
All forms of life upon the planet Earth were granted one great and wondrous gift: the gift of communication. Instead of being forced to exist in solitude, this gift allows interaction, a sharing of feelings. Humans are especially fortunate because they have developed many ways to use their gift. These include music, dance, art, theater, literature, gestures, the written word, and word of mouth. The creation of different ways to communicate does not mean we can sit back and take our gift for granted. When we were infants, all we needed to do was cry and our desire for food, a clean diaper, or love and nurturing companionship was met. Now that we are older, however, we can no longer count on others to interpret our cries. We must use our gift of communication effectively through clarification, patience, understanding, sympathy, intelligence, compassion, and tact; we must exercise self-control so others can use the gift of communication by careful, effective listening. By sharing this gift of communication mankind is exalted.
Over my career I have written a number of articles related to self-esteem. In 1992 Kendall Hunt Publishers published 9 books which were a summary of the articles which I had written related to self-esteem. In this section we will focus on the sixth of the Tools for Coping Series all of which were published in 1992. The book is Tools for Communications.
This was the sixth book in the Tools for Coping Series (1992) by James Messina published by Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, Dubuque, Iowa. Tools for Communications was then published on coping.org in 1999 and finally some of the chapters were tranferred to Livestrong in January 2009 after Design Media purchased coping.org. What follows are the original order of the chapters from the 1992 version which have been revised, ;updated, edited and reformated.
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