Contexts of communication:
On a daily basis, we often talk, speak and interact with many people around us. This is called communication. Communication is all about exchanging messages and finding ways of sending messages across a group of people or different people. Effective communication is extremely important in a health and social care context because it is required help you understand your clients’ feelings and emotions, as well as creating a positive relationship with your clients, relatives, colleagues, other health care professionals and different service users through communication. For instance, if a teacher is having a conversation with a student of pupil about a specific topic and the teacher seems friendly, has a positive body language and interacting fairly well, the student is more likely to open up to the teacher and discuss anything problems or worries that the student is facing, leading them to build a bond and better relationship.
There are two different contexts of communication that are used in our everyday life; the first one is one to one communication. One to one communication and is an only conversation between two people; giving information and expressing themselves towards each other. Normally when you are starting a conversation with someone that you don’t know really well, it is important that you try to create a positive emotional atmosphere before you go on to talking or discussing about the things you want to talk or discuss about as well as giving information to them. The other person also needs to feel happy, calm and relaxed to talk to you, and you can also help the other person do this by being happy, calm and relaxed yourself. It is very often that people will start a one to one communication by greeting them such as ‘Hello’ or ‘Good morning.’ You can start to move on to talk about the things you want to talk about after you have created a positive feeling. Once the conversation is starting to finish, you would like the other person to leave with the right kind of emotions. For instance, you may say ‘Talk to you later’ or ‘See you soon’ to show that you really value and appreciate them’.
The second context of communication is group communication. Group communication is a form of communication utilized by a group of people as the name suggests. Involving or taking part in a group communication includes the same issues as one to one communication along with some extra issues. Group communication only works well if the people in the group want to be involved and take part. There are times where people may stay quiet because they are worried about other people’s reactions to what they’re saying or they may feel frightened or threatened to talk within a formal group of individuals. It is fairly important that everyone in the group has the right emotional atmosphere, just like the one to one communication. It is often that in groups, people will use different friendly ways of behaviour or humour to produce the correct group feeling that encourages people to start talking.
It is often that in some group communications such as classroom discussions or team meetings have a group leader. The group leader is often encouraging people to focus and concentrate on a specific task within the group. It is important to have a group leader as the leader is able to support and encourage other members in the group to express their ideas and help the members to take turn when talking in order to have a successful group discussion.
When you are speaking in a formal group, you will need to prepare and think through what you’re going to say before you share it out to the rest of the group. As talking to a group, this may feel completely different from talking in a one-to-one scenario as you may need to do extra or more preparation.
If everyone is talking at the same time, group communication will fail and not work. It is a lot easier to figure out who is speaking in a one-to-one conversation rather than in