Charting Your Course for Effective Communication: SDI in Communication

by Aileen Ellis, Susan Washburn, Peggy Wallis

Working with people everyday, we are often reminded of that line from a Christmas song, Do you hear what I hear? The bottom line is that... they don’t. The complex reality of communication is that we can often hear exactly the same words but extract totally different messages or meanings. There are just too many things that get in between what the message sender sends and the message receiver receives.

Charting Your Course for Effective Communication breaks down the reasons why communication breaks down and provides practical ways to improve it—and your relationships.

This book is a passport into the world of communication—the basis of our relationships with others. It provides a method of recognizing how values impact interpersonal communication. With the help of this book, readers will be prepared to communicate more effectively by increasing their relationship awareness. Along with the SDI (Strength Deployment Inventory), you will discover a powerful tool for enhancing your ability to communicate more effectively AND handle conflict more productively.

142 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2011

Reviews

[Mohammed Barakat · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I liked about this book is the new perspective, at least to me, of being an effective communicator. It focuses on the Motivational Value System (MVS) concept that classifies people and their motivations into different colors that determine their behavior and how they encode and decode information. The book shows the reader how a single message can be interpreted in different ways if conveyed to receivers with varying MVS’s; hence, MVS acts as a filtering component in any communication model.

The book shows how learning different MVSs leads to more effective communication. I believe it is true that if someone of a Green MVS learns how to communicate in Blue or Red MVSs and learn when and how to use them will get his message more effectively to persons with different MVSs than his/hers.

I like how the book links MVS to conflict. We can avoid an ‘invitation’ to conflict by understanding its triggers. Is it a preventable conflict that we can avoid, or is it a real threat to self-worth?

In general, I believe the book is a very good introduction to the psychology behind effective communication, although sometimes I felt examples and stories are overly written in a way you get lost about the idea, they are helpful to understand the point.