5 Habits of Highly Effective Communicators

1.    Mind the say-do gap. This is all about trust, which is the bedrock of effective leadership. Your behavior is your single greatest mode of communication, and it must be congruent with what you say. If your actions don’t align with your words, there’s trouble. And it can turn into big trouble if not corrected swiftly and genuinely.  Since it’s often difficult to see the say-do gap in yourself, rely on a few trusted colleagues to tell it to you straight and flag discrepancies. Rule of thumb: it’s better to say nothing or delay your communication until you’re certain that your actions will ring true.
2.    Make the complex simple.   Your employees and customers are being bombarded 24/7 by information, making it hard for them to hear you. Simplicity has never been more powerful or necessary. Effective leaders distill complex thoughts and strategies into simple, memorable terms that colleagues and customers can grasp and act upon. If you’re having trouble distilling something to its essence, it may be that you don’t understand it. So get clear and look out for technical jargon and business speak, which add complexity. Say what you mean in as few words as possible.
3.   Find your own voice. Use language that’s distinctly your own. Let your values come through in your communication. Often, executives will opt for the sanitized “corporate voice” instead of their own because they think the former is more eloquent; more appropriate. This is not to say that correct grammar and use of language aren’t important — strong leaders know how to string a sentence together. But don’t fixate on eloquence; concentrate on being distinct and real. People want real. People respect real. People follow real. Don’t disguise who you are. Be genuine, and people will respect you for it.
4.    Be visible. Visibility is about letting your key stakeholders get a feel for who you are and what you care about. It’s easy to hide behind a computer and transmit messages to others without seeing or interacting with them. Although e-communication serves a valuable purpose, it is no substitute for face-to-face and voice-to-voice communication. In today’s environment, people are often burned out and need to feel a personal connection to you and the work that you believe in.  Do a “calendar test” to make sure you’re allocating time regularly to be out on the floor, in the factory, in the call center, in the lab, in the store. Show your people that you’re engaged and care about them and their work.
5.    Listen with your eyes as well as your ears. Stop, look and listen. Remember that effective communication is two-way. Good leaders know how to ask good questions, and then listen with both their eyes and ears. It’s easy to be so focused on getting your message out — or persuading others — that you don’t tune in to what you see and hear. Because you’re in a position of authority, the stakes are even higher because you won’t always get direct feedback. You need to read between the lines. Listen and hear what is coming back at you. Look for the nonverbal cues. Sometimes a person’s body language will tell you everything you need to know.

Types of communication

• Verbal communication include sounds, words, language, and speech. Speaking is an effective way of communicating and helps in expressing our emotions in words. This form of communication is further classified into four types.
• Nonverbal communication manages to convey the sender's message without having to use words.This form of communication supersedes all other forms because of its usage and effectiveness. Nonverbal communication involves the use of physical ways of communication, such as tone of the voice, touch, and expressions. Symbols and sign language are also included in nonverbal communication. Body posture and language convey a lot of nonverbal messages when communicating verbally with someone.

• Written communication is the medium through which the message of the sender is conveyed with the help of written words.
  Letters, personal journals, e-mails, reports, articles, and memos are some forms of written communication.

• This form of communication involves the visual display of information, wherein the message is understood or expressed with the help of visual aids. For example, topography, photography, signs, symbols, maps, colors, posters, banners and designs help the viewer understand the message visually.
   Movies and plays, television shows and video clips are all electronic form of visual communication.
  

Sometimes people really should talk more

language

 
I think this picture represents well what language entails.

4 examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think

1. Navigation and Pormpuraawans
   In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.
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2. Blame and English Speakers
   In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.
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3. Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers
   Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.
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4. Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
   In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

Examples of animal Communication

How do animals communicate?

Animals might not be able to speak or master advanced language techniques, but they certainly have other ways of communicating. Whale song, wolf howls, frog croaks, bird chips -- even the waggle dance of the honeybee or the vigorous waving of a dog's tail -- are among the panoply of ways animals transmit information to each other and to other denizens of the animal kingdom.
Species often rely on verbal and nonverbal forms of communication, such as calls; non-vocal auditory outbursts, like the slap of a dolphin's tail on the water; bioluminescence; scent marking; chemical or tactile cues; visual signals and postural gestures. Fireflies and peacocks are classic examples of brilliant bioluminescence and impressive visual displays, respectively. Ants use chemical cues (in a process called chemoreception) to help guide their foraging adventures, as well as for other activities like telling friend from foe, connecting with new mates and marshalling the colony's defenses.
When it comes to acoustic communication, not every member of a species is just alike. Animals in different regions have often been overhead sounding off in different dialects. For example, one study found that blue whales produce different patterns of pulses, tones and pitches depending on where they're from. Some bird species are the same way. And what about those birds that live on the border between territories of differing songsters? They often become bilingual, so to speak, and able to communicate in the singing parlance favored by each of their groups of neighbors.
Communication between species can play important roles as well. One study suggested that the reason Madagascan spiny-tailed iguanas have well-developed ears -- despite the fact that they don't communicate vocally -- is so they can hear the warning calls of the Madagascan paradise flycatcher. The two species have nothing in common except for the fact that they share a general habitat and raptors like to snack on them. So when an iguana hears a bird raise the alarm among other birds, it likely knows to be on alert for incoming predators, too.
However, as noise pollution interferes with animal communiqués all across the globe, many animals' ability to communicate effectively comes under fire. Increased shipping traffic over the last century has dramatically affected the transfer of whale song around the ocean basin. Studies have found that songbirds, too, suffer from noisy (albeit terrestrial) urban environs. Some species have had to modify their singing styles, producing songs that are louder and shriller, in order to be heard above the clamor. Pumped up volume usually leads to simpler and somewhat inferior styles of singing that female birds seem to find decidedly less sexy.

What is communication?

Communication (from Latin commūnicāre, meaning "to share") is the activity of conveying information through the exchange of thoughts, messages, or information, as by speech, visuals, signals, writing, or behavior. It is the meaningful exchange of information between two or more living creatures.
One definition of communication is “any act by which one person gives to or receives from another person information about that person's needs, desires, perceptions, knowledge, or affective states. Communication may be intentional or unintentional, may involve conventional or unconventional signals, may take linguistic or non-linguistic forms, and may occur through spoken or other modes.”

Communication requires a sender, a message, and a recipient, although the receiver does not have to be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast distances in time and space. Communication requires that the communicating parties share an area of communicative commonality. The communication process is complete once the receiver understands the sender's message.
Communicating with others involves three primary steps:

• Thought: First, information exists in the mind of the sender. This can be a concept, idea, information, or feelings.
• Encoding: Next, a message is sent to a receiver in words or other symbols.
• Decoding: Lastly, the receiver translates the words or symbols into a concept or information that a person can understand.

What is language?

Language is the human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, and a language is any specific example of such a system. The scientific study of language is called linguistics.

Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing modern languages to determine which traits their ancestral languages must have had in order for the later developmental stages to occur. A group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family. The languages that are most spoken in the world today belong to the Indo-European family, which include English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Hindi; the Sino-Tibetan family, which includes Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and many others; the Afro-Asiatic family, which includes Arabic, Amharic, Somali, and Hebrew; the Bantu languages, which include Swahili, Zulu, Shona, and hundreds of other languages spoken throughout Africa; and the Malayo-Polynesian languages, which include Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog, Malagasy, and hundreds of other languages spoken throughout the Pacific. Academic consensus holds that between 50% and 90% of languages spoken at the beginning of the twenty-first century will probably have become extinct by the year 2100.

New blog theme

Hello, from this day I will begin to talk about communication and language.
I hope you find it interesting.


 

Modern Globalization

The 19th century witnessed the advent of globalization approaching its modern form. Industrialization allowed cheap production of household items using economies of scale, while rapid population growth created sustained demand for commodities. Globalization in this period was decisively shaped by nineteenth-century imperialism. After the Opium Wars and the completion of British conquest of India, vast populations of these regions became ready consumers of European exports.
Between the globalization in the 19th and in the 20th there are significant differences. There are two main points on which the differences can be seen. One point is the global trade in this centuries as well as the capital, investment and the economy.

The global trade in the 20th shows a higher share of trade in tradable production, a growth of the trade in services and the rise of production and trade by multinational firms. The production of tradable goods in the 20th century largely decreased from the levels seen in the 19th. However, the amount of tradable goods that were produced for the merchandise trade grew. The trade in services also grew more important in the 20th compared to the 19th century. The last point that distinguishes the global trade in the 19th century compared to the global trade in the 20th century, is the extent of multinational cooperation. In the 20th century you can see a "quantum leap" in multinational cooperation compared to the 19th century. Before the 20th century began, there were just Portfolio investment, but no trade-related or production-relation Direct investment.

El Chavo japanese

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mq9Agdtpfs

The link above is an episode of "El Chavo del Ocho" in Japanese, this is a very good example of globalization. Something very typical Mexican seen in distant lands.

Sad reality

I understand this image as: You don't go to Paris for buy a Nike cap, Paris has many beautiful places to see.
It's the same example with London. And if you go to Rome you should eat italian food, not hamburguers, these are everywhere.