Pushpa Priya

The term `Communication` carries a wide range of implications in our daily lives. What intrigued me to pick up this issue is when I find people communicating with each other and unable to make others understand the intended message and sometimes encounters with controversial situations.

Life-sustaining Role
Communication plays a life-sustaining role to make our purpose done, to send and receive a piece of information or message and solves daily life problems with solutions. According to Loise E. Boone, 'communication barriers are the problems that arise at every stage of the communication process and have the potential to create misunderstanding and confusion.
How to overcome this problem is a significant question that revolves around the mind of people of every field. The requisite of Effective Communication is felt up at every place; from home to school/college and working places.
Effective Command of this skill helps to get rid of any disputable situation and helps in maintaining an easy and comfortable life. Before stepping in any organization; the first thing that is evaluated is communication skills.
The ability to recognize the communication issues and come to a resolution can drastically improve relationship bonds, working relations at working place and organizational culture. There are many reasons why interpersonal communications may fail.
In many communications, the delivered message may not be received exactly. There are many communication barriers and these may occur at any stage in the communication process. The communication barriers are the physical barrier, a psychological barrier, attitudinal barrier, physiological barrier, semantic barrier and poor communication skills.
The barrier that already exists in the environment is the physical barrier. The physical barrier is externally driven barrier. The factors that come under physical barrier are noise, time, distance, defects in the medium and physical barriers to non-verbal communication.
For instance, when two people want to communicate and if the receiver is in hurry and does not have time to listen to the communicator, it acts as a barrier. This same problem may occur when you geographically separate departments and the functions of an organization. Quick face to face communication becomes difficult due to more distance.
The telephone may not provide the answer. The line may be busy when the call is placed, or the person being called may be out of the office. Similarly, defects in the medium also act as a barrier to effective communication. For example, A is communicating to B over a telephone line and there is a disturbance in telephone, the receiver(B) can not get an exact or intended message of the sender(A).
Moreover, noise and other distractions and unpleasant environment also come under an external physical barrier to effective communication. For example, Akriti is having a hard time discussing her extra time work incentives with her employer.
The office is cold, cramped and dull, and the way it is set up is not conducive to putting the employee at ease. There is noise or outside distraction and the employee loses concentration. These barriers keep the message from getting through. Sometimes not being able to see the non-verbal cues, gestures posture and general body language can make communication less than effective.
Phone calls, text messages and other communication methods that rely on technology are less effective than face- to face communication.

Psychological Barrier
One of the major communication barriers is psychological. It is internally driven and associated with mental. In other words, it relates to emotions, sentiments and mood of the sender and receiver.
The psychological state of the sender will determine how the message is sent, received and perceived. Here the strong emotions like anger, arrogance(ego), over happiness, fear, anxiety, sadness, nervousness, etc blocks communication process.
Being extremely nervous on a personal agenda or a certain way of winning an argument attitude can make communication less than effective. Such inner fear emotion is also known as emotional noise, which is one of the major barriers in the communication process. The same message can be interpreted in different ways when you are sad, angry, excitedly happy and when you are in a calm state.
In the psychological barrier, there comes about imbalanced emotional state, distrust, premature evaluation(immediately jumping to conclusion), lack of attention.
Anger is one of the examples of the psychological barrier to communication. When we are angry it is easier to say the things that we may later regret, and also to misinterpret what others are saying. people with low self-esteem and sad maybe less assertive and therefore not feel comfortable because they consistently go through emotional imbalance inside and out.
They feel shy, fear or embarrassed about how they feel, or read unintended negative sub-texts in messages they hear. Similarly, Stress is also one of the psychological communication barriers.
If someone is stressed they may be preoccupied with personal problems and not able to communicate appropriately. Expectations and prejudices lead to false assumptions or stereotyping. People often hear what they expect to hear rather than what is said or meant and jump to incorrect conclusions.
Likewise, attitudinal behaviour is also one of the communication barriers that hinder the communication process. Attitudinal barriers are behaviour or perceptions that prevent people from communicating effectively. It may result from personality conflicts, poor management, resistance to change or a lack of motivation.
Most often personality conflicts occur due to the difference in the status relationship. Feeling of superiority and inferiority complex hinders whole communication process. Lack of motivational environment also hinders effective communication.
The next barrier of effective communication is the personal barrier. It consists of prejudge-mental attitude, perceptual obstacles, and information overloaded, look distraction etc. Some people are easily distracted by the good and bad look of a person paying attention to their looks forgetting the intended message to be transmitted.
Moreover, Semantic barrier related to language and linguistic ability may act as a barrier to effective communication. Even though some person having the same language, the terminology used in a message may act as a barrier if is not fully understood by the receiver.

Poor Skills
Poor communication skills are hindrances to the effective communication process. Lack of skills in writing and speaking creates defectives encoding of the messages. This damages the objective of communication. .Poor listening and poor reading are the shortcomings of effective communications.
One should know how to overcome the communication barrier. First of all, it is important to know the formulated purpose in any conversation. Once it is found, it is easy entering into a conversation. Is it to be social? Make an impression, be polite etc.
To better communicate, we must try to see ourselves through the eyes of others in the communication link. By developing some empathy with the people to whom we will be directing messages, we might recognize the need to modify our messages from time to time before sending them.

(The author teaches English to college students)