the insights and practice they need to become more skillful communicators.
Career Builders: Exercises and checklists exploring the relationship between communication skills and career success.
Exploring Diversity: Activities designed to help students explore the connections between culture, gender, and communication.
Ethics and Communication: Experiential vehicles designed to help students work their way through ethical quandaries and define for themselves the meaning of “ethical communication.”
Each boxed series is designed to promote critical inquiry and reflection as it challenges students to complete and analyze self-inventories, assess how advances in technology are reshaping communication, and become actively involved in meeting 21st-century communication challenges and designing a “future me”—envisioning and demonstrating how improving communication skills paves a path to personal and professional success.
We hope students and instructors enjoy using The Communication Playbook as much as we enjoyed working on it!
All our best,
Teri and Michael Gamble
Acknowledgments
It is such a pleasure to work with the professionals at SAGE that it makes it difficult to single out who to thank because the work that all the folks at SAGE do is seamless. From the firm commitment given this project by Matthew Byrnie; to the unyielding support and fresh ideas provided by acquisitions editor Terri Accomazzo, who believed in this project from the get-go; to the understanding, creativity, and insights provided by content developmental editors Sarah Calabi and Jennifer Jovin; the team behind The Communication Playbook has been phenomenal. We also want to offer a shout-out to the painstaking efforts of production editor Andrew Olson and copy editor Colleen Brennan, who asked all the right questions and helped to ensure the book’s readability and accuracy. But what would a text be without its design team? We would like to offer a very special thanks to them: C&M Digitals and cover designer Scott Van Atta.
We are also grateful to the many talented faculty who read our book, offering their suggestions and making this edition a better one. These individuals include:
Chantele Carr, Estrella Mountain Community College
Yvonne M. Fielder, Des Moines Area Community College
Sean McPherson, Massachusetts Maritime Academy
Emily Richardson, University of Pikeville
David Scales, Naugatuck Valley Community College
About the Authors
Teri Kwal Gamble, a full professor of communication at the College of New Rochelle in New Rochelle, New York (PhD, New York University; MA and BA, Lehman College CUNY), and Michael W. Gamble, a full professor of communication at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City (PhD, New York University; BA and MFA, University of Oklahoma) are long-time partners in life and work. Professional writers of education and training materials, the Gambles are the coauthors of numerous text and trade books. Their most recent publication was the second edition of the Public Speaking Playbook (2018). Among some of the other books the Gambles have written are Nonverbal Messages Tell More: A Practical Guide to Nonverbal Communication (2017), The Gender Communication Connection (2nd ed., 2014), and Leading With Communication (2013). Prior to Michael’s career as a college professor, he served as an officer and taught leadership skills for the U.S. Army Infantry School. Together, Teri and Mike founded Interact Training Systems, a communication consulting firm. They love living and working together!
1 Start Right Here
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After completing this chapter, you should be able to:
1.1 Discuss the nature of “communication presence.”
1.2 Define communication.
1.3 Explain the essential elements of communication and their interaction.
1.4 Use a transactional model of communication to visualize the communication process in action.
1.5 Describe the core principles of good communication.
1.6 Evaluate the benefits of communicating effectively.
1.7 Apply skills for improving your communication effectiveness.
Communication—the human connection, is the key to personal and career success.
Paul J. Meyer
Be brutally honest. Do you spend any of your free time thinking about communication? More specifically, have you ever imagined the words others might choose to describe you as a communicator? Take a moment and do that now. After engaging in conversation with you, might others say that you were present or distracted, authentic or fake, empathetic or distant? How are they likely to describe your behavior as a coworker or team member? Might they see you as cooperative and collaborative, or would they instead judge you to be self-concerned and a blocker? What words might those in an audience you were speaking to use to describe your speech-making abilities? Would they find you prepared and persuasive or ill prepared and uninspiring? And when roles were switched, how might other speakers describe you as a member of their audience? Might they report that you were attentive and encouraging, or would they perceive you to be bored or “out-to-lunch”? In each case, the adjectives others attribute to you, how you come across to them, are your communication presence.
Our goal is to help you make communication work as effectively as you can in all the social and professional settings you frequent, whether you are engaging with others online or face-to-face. With this in mind, welcome to The Communication Playbook, your resource for communication skills for life and career success.
What is Communication Presence?
We 21st-century communicators face complex challenges. Each of us bears personal and social responsibility for developing, sharing, and then managing a unique identity or communication presence—the composite of characteristics we present both in the physical and online world. Effectively, we each create a real-world or face-to-face identity and a digital-world or virtual identity for others to consume. It is as we navigate between these two spaces—the physical and the digital—that the unique personal communication presence that others attribute to us when we interact with them, both online and offline takes shape, and it speaks volumes.
How others in both the physical and digital world perceive our communication presence affects their opinions of us and our relationships with them. The objective, of course, is for our communication presence to be positive, authentic, and serve as a success catalyst.
Becoming adept at connecting with
