Reasoning and its Importance in Effective Communication

August 10th, 2007 by Samir

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He who will not reason, is a bigot ; he who cannot is a fool ; and he who dares not is a slave.
— Sir William Drummond

Communication is a key aspect of human life. It is our ability to communicate and our need to communicate that makes us human. If we “think” and “therefore we are”, it would not be a stretch to place discourse and the exchange of ideas with other human beings on equal footing with thinking as one of the corner stones of our existence. On some level it is the very reason for our existence. In a strange twist of word play, to excel at this reason for our existence, you must ultimately depend on Reason itself.

Communicating effectively is not simply a bonus business skill or a neat trick for cocktail parties, it is more like an essential survival skill for every member of the human race. This communication between sentient beings is impossible without the reasoning skills of the human brain. While so much of day-to-day human communication might resort to emotional outbursts and random shouting, reason is an essential element of any communication you want to undertake with some positive outcome in mind. To cultivate your ability to use reason in your communications, you need to master a few virtues:

Enlightenment
To be enlightened is to have an open mind and to think rather than assume, to understand rather than to pass judgement. This allows you to approach an other human being without preconceived notions and to communicate with them on equal footing. Since so much of communication involves either information or persuasion, an enlightened attitude naturally puts the other person(s) in a receptive mood to listen to what you have to say. For communication to be effective, a receptive audience is a basic requirement.
Knowledge
When you are communicating to inform, knowledge is a prerequisite, because what you do not have you cannot give. The same holds true for persuasion but even more so. Not only do you need to know what you are talking about when trying to persuade people to your point-of-view, but the fact that you are knowledgeable builds confidence in the people you are communicating with. Human beings are very finely tuned to subtle hints of tone and body language that give away the fact that someone is ignorant, or doesn’t know what they are saying. Effective communication cannot occur in such circumstances.
Courage
All communication is taking a stand, and all good communication is putting yourself and your beliefs out there in the firing line of opinion. Those are the pressures and consequences we live with. Those who have the courage of their convictions thus have a braver face to show to the targets of their communication. The audience, whether it be one person or an entire stadium of them, favours the brave and those with courage grab the hearts and minds of the listeners. You cannot communicate effectively without the courage of reasoning on your side.

Communication is an invaluable element of human existence and communication that works separates the successful from the unsuccessful in all human endeavour. As long as you have the steady hand of reason guided by the enlightenment of your spirit, the knowledge of your intellect, and the courage in your heart, you are well on the path to effective communication.

This post was guest blogged by Samir Bharadwaj. He is a freelance writer and design generalist who blogs about his ideas, and ideas in general at Samir Bharadwaj dot Com.

Posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Communicating Effectively. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.