Communication: Mechanical and Social Principles

Communication is one of the fundamental necessities of our relationships with other people, whether it is a stranger, work colleague, family member, child or life partner. While our interpersonal relationships can be rewarding, many of us find ourselves in situations of mis-communication and communication breakdown, often leading to interpersonal conflict.
Do you find that people often misinterpret what you are saying or your intentions? Have you ever felt that you have totally missed the meaning of what someone else was communicating to you? Do you have difficulty expressing what you would like to say? Rest assured, many of us are confronted with situations like this in our relationships with others! We are left feeling like we are not being heard and our relationships suffer. In the end, our most developed societal tool is also one of the most productive conflict factories in the history of mankind.
In order to tackle two problems with a single solution, we've devised a comprehensive article on communication - and how improving it can not only improve your personal relationships, but also ensure that your professional life is on the right lane.
What is communication?
Body language, sign language, verbal language, writing, gestures, broadcasting - you name it, it is part of the process of communication. Communication is a broad concept and its history can be traced from a wide variety of pathways. Gesture and body language are the most primitive forms of communication, being practiced even before humans were able to produce 'sound' verbal language. Verbal language is possibly the most prominent human form of communication (albeit not the most used - it is perceived to be only 7% to 11% of communication). Some philosophers affirm that our capacity to verbally communicate with each other is the link which separates humans from other animals in the evolutionary scale.

Written language, another particularly prominent and advanced form of human communication, was initiated not so long ago - around 3,000 B.C. when the Egyptian civilisation created their first set of hieroglyphics. The complexity of human communication evolved analogously with the human capacity of learning, invoking major evolutionary changes in the brain structure and resulting in our capacity to improve (or arguably complicate) the way in which we communicate to each other. For the purpose of this article, we'll focus on verbal communication and body language.