Everyone needs good communication skills. Effective communication will help you feel more confident about yourself, more comfortable with others’ perceptions of you, greater ease in reasoning with others, better at using language, and improvement in your critical thinking skills. It is the ultimate people-oriented discipline, fundamental to effective leadership, and a key to professional success.

Strategic flexibility (SF) means expanding your communication repertoire to enable you to use the best skill or behavior available for a particular situation. People who possess SF are happier and more fulfilled because they can bring to bear on any situation a broad range of potentially valuable behaviors. The six steps of SF are anticipate, assess, evaluate, select, apply, and reassess and reevaluate.

Creativity is the capacity to synthesize vast amounts of information and wrestle with complex problems. Your creativity frees you to generate possibilities, which of course is the very foundation of SF.

Communication is an ongoing process in which people share ideas and feelings. The elements of communication include sender-receivers, messages, channels, feedback, noise, and setting. The essence of communication is meaning making, and meaning is jointly created between sender and receiver.

Every communication is a transaction. Viewing communication as a transaction focuses on the people who are communicating and the changes that take place in them as they are communicating. It also implies that all participants are involved continuously and simultaneously; that communication events have a past, present, and future; and that the roles the participants play will affect the communication.

Six types of communication are discussed in this book. Intrapersonal communication is communication within oneself. Interpersonal communication is informal communication with one or more other persons. Small-group communication occurs when a small group of people get together to solve a problem. Computer-mediated communication refers to a wide range of technologies that facilitate both human communication and the interactive sharing of information through computer networks. It is discussed in the in-text appendix. Public communication is giving a speech to an audience. Intercultural communication occurs whenever two or more people from different cultures interact.

Ethical communication, a component of each of the six types of communication above, is communication that is honest, fair, and considerate of others’ rights. Underlying the seven principles of ethical conduct paraphrased from the National Communication Association’s Credo are the themes of caring and responsibility. Proper ethical conduct often grows out of an individual’s personal commitment to live an ethical life.

Communication can be improved if you concentrate on several important areas. Find out what communication skills are important to you. Discover the kinds of communication that are most difficult for you and work to improve them. Seek out people who will help you develop these skills and give you support and feedback, and set a realistic timetable for improvement.

The Internet plays with the sender-message-receiver features of the elements of communication. There are four characteristics that make it unique from normal face-to-face communication: globalization, temporality, access to roles, and content openness. The Internet will continue to lead to changes in how people communicate, solve problems, and create knowledge.