The Process and Barriers of Communication

By Dawn Ardent




By Dawn Ardent


The process of communication
We often ignore the process of communication and focus only on the meaning of some of the words being carried. The process of communication can be simplified thus:
the speaker formulates his thoughts to himself
the speaker finds words to describe and encode his thoughts with
the speaker transfers the words to the listener through air by speaking
the listener recognizes and decodes the words
the listener assigns meanings to the words based on past experience Simple, isn't it? It is important to understand the process of communication, because communication can become distorted and erroneous at any of those steps. If the process of communication is repeated many times, the probability of errors is reduced - the speaker and the listener can achieve an accord of mutual understanding. Remember that communication is never complete or infallible, but can only be reliable to a satisfactory degree.
Barriers of communication
There are two main barriers of communication: unwillingness to communicate and inability to communicate.
If one of the participants is unwilling to communicate, it is obvious that communication will fail to be. Another, less obvious barrier of communication is when a participant is unwilling to understand, or worse yet, unwilling to tolerate emotionally. Such unwillingness often stems from subconscious fears.
Inability to communicate can be present because of obvious physical reasons (eg. you can't send an email if your internet connection is down). However, inability to communicate can also be present because the speaker does not understand his thoughts sufficiently or otherwise fails to formulate them into words. Such inability often stems from insufficient understanding of oneself.
There can be plenty of barriers of communication, and in case of a breakdown of communication analyzing the barriers can point to a helpful solution.