Improve Your Communication Skills, 2nd Edition

9 What is Communication?
We can call this process ‘perceptual completion’, and it’s not 
limited to visual information. Perceptual completion shows that 
all understanding is a ‘best guess’.
A new model of communication
What does all this mean for communication?
To begin with, the most important question we can ask when 
we are communicating is:
‘What effect am I having?’
How does the information we are giving relate to the other 
person’s mental models? What meaning do they attach to our 
behaviour, our words, gestures and voice?
But we can go further. The pattern-matching model of 
communication suggests three important principles.
First, communication is continuous. If we are always 
updating our understanding, then communication needs to be 
continuous to be effective: not a one-off event, like a radio 
transmission, but a process.
Second, communication is complicated. Whatever we 
understand, has been communicated. That means everything we 
observe: not just the words someone speaks, but the music of 
Figure 1.2 
A Kanizsa triangle
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10 Improve your Communication Skills
their voice and the dance of their body. Some of the signals we 
send out are intentional; very many are not. We communicate 
if 
we are being observed.
Third, communication is contextual. It never happens in 
isolation. The meaning of the communication is affected by at 
least five different contexts.
• Psychological
: who you are and what you bring to the 
communication; your needs, desires, values and beliefs.
• Relational
: how we define each other and behave in 
relation to each other; where power or status lies;