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Communication and working relationships in sport and fitness
Communication and working relationships in sport and fitness

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10 Summary

The main learning points from this session are:

  • Building effective working relationships is more likely if the principles of a person-centred approach are used in which communication is authentic, non-judgemental and empathetic.
  • Authenticity is viewed as the way in which you might show some of your feelings and, where appropriate, choose to share these feelings if you believe it might benefit communication and/or learning.
  • Empathy is seen as a significant skill in effective communication, and one that needs practice.
  • The skill of active listening can be summarised as:
    • attentive body language (non-verbal communication) that uses appropriate posture, gestures, eye-contact and facial expressions to show engagement
    • following skills that allow the speaker to talk in their own way with verbal encouragement and infrequent questions and silences, as appropriate
    • reflective skills in any dialogue that restate feelings or message content and summarise main issues.

In the next session, you will continue to explore how your communication contributes to connecting with people you work with. This ranges from subtle verbal and non-verbal signals that encourage dialogue, to giving away a little personal information about yourself to help build rapport an trust. This is all a delicate balancing act and you will also identify what can get in the way of relationships: you will explore something called your ‘unconscious bias’.

You can now go to Session 4 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .