Communication is extremely important in building healthy relationships—both personally and professionally. The importance of proper communication is such that people judge your personality and character based on your verbal and non-verbal mannerisms. Hence, it is important to tune your conduct and communication in a way that you can easily mingle and be accepted in your peer-groups. And, this is precisely what communication exercises seek to achieve for you—they help people find out and eliminate their communication barriers and also improve relationships in general. These exercises, by way of improving communication, boost morales, motivate individuals and help improve efficiency and effectiveness of people at their workplaces. They also contribute quite a lot towards overall personality development and serve as ice-breakers for newly-formed groups. Keeping in mind that communication is the door that, once unlocked, leads to a wonderful world of prosperity and healthy relationships, the importance of communication exercises cannot be overemphasized. Read on for more!
Importance Of Communication Exercises
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Best known for building cohesion and trust among the employees by facilitating effective interaction and consequently increasing productivity, communication exercises are looked upon with much importance by today’s organizations.
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Communication exercises improve basic relationships between people. Introductory communication exercises incorporate fun, interaction and creativity and hence double-up as icebreakers. They are therefore, most common before meetings and/or in work center orientations.
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Many a times, poor communication can lead to catastrophic misinterpretations and cause misunderstandings and friction and rejection. It can also damage your relationships, performance at work, self-confidence and even physical health. These basic exercises help you understand the pitfalls of communication and make you more aware in this arena.
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Communication exercises are tried and tested ways of dealing with ineffective communication and the consequences. This fact, in itself proves that you need not go through trial and error for acquiring good communication skills. Just understanding basic exercises can be good enough and time saving.
Sample Exercises
Ice-Breaker
This simple and interactive exercise is not only a communication skill developer, but also a relationship builder. This is ideal for a group which has a leader. The leader selects a topic—on which the questions must be framed—and also a person to answer questions based on the topic. For instance, if you select “babysitting” as a topic, then the team-members can ask various questions about babysitting from the selected person. Answers to these questions determine how much the individual understands the task. This exercise also helps people understand the various ways in which a single task can be done—communication achieved over a game.
Verbal Exercises
These are exercises that develop verbal skills. Choose a long path and place various types of obstacles in the course. Make two people teams. The objective of these teams is to cross the path given that the person crossing the obstacle-ridden path (P1) is blindfolded while the other (P2) stands far and instructs P1 so that s/he reaches the destination safely. This exercise enhances communication skills especially, instruction skills.
Non-Verbal Exercise
Split the group into two teams. Write random concepts or scenes to be acted out on small paper chits and keep all of them in a hat or bowl and place at the centre of the crowd. Ask one person from every team to pick up the slips and then act out the scene or situation to his/her team. If the actor’s team gets the idea right then it wins a point—no negative marking. To make the game more competitive, you can have the opposing team making wrong guesses to misguide the guessing team. This exercise helps to develop non-verbal skills such as gestures and facial expressions.
Listening Exercise
Team up your group in pairs of two and make the partners sit comfortably close to each other. One of the partners speaks first while other person listens. The speaker speaks something, for instance, about ‘the most important day in his/her life’. Once the person is done with the speech, the other person tries to repeat it. Other listeners can point out the missing points. This simple exercise is designed to develop listening skills.
There are many such exercises that help improve communication skills and practicing such exercises in the form of games make learning all the more easy and fun.
