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Christina M. Currie

Christina M. Currie's Touch of Spice column appears Fridays in the Craig Daily Press. E-mail her at director@craig-chamber.com

When gauging the workforce readiness of new employees, employers interviewed by the Partnership for 21st Century skills listed oral communication as the third most desirable skill and written communication as the ninth. And, those same employers said those are two skills that most high school and college graduates are lacking.

People talk about the need for good communication skills, but you're hard-pressed to get a clear definition about what constitutes good communication.

I consider my communication skills in the decent-to-high range. I'm a professional writer. I have no fears of public speaking. I often speak my mind, whether my input is solicited or warranted.

But I'm finding that there's a lot more to communicating effectively than is included in what you say.

Eight-year-old Katie and 7-year-old Nikki loved the movie "The Golden Compass" so much, we bought it and named our puppy after one of the main characters. In a frenzy precipitated by my own feelings of inadequacy as a parent, I bought the entire series in paperback and decided that would be our nightly group reading material.

We piled into Nikki's bed, and I read though the first chapter, which details the exploits of young Lyra, who hides in a wardrobe to spy on her uncle during a high-tension meeting where he releases scientific evidence about a phenomenon many other attendees don't want to understand.

I was quite proud of myself after toiling through, and I put the girls to bed feeling very superior.

In an effort to continue the feeling of engaged family activity and to assess what details Katie absorbed, I asked her to tell me what happened in that first chapter.

What she reported was slim and not well-developed.

And then she looked at me and asked, "What's a wardrobe?"

Oh, my.

There was no shame in the fact that she didn't recognize the word, but I realized that the chapter must have included the word "wardrobe" at least 30 times. Not knowing what it was really had hindered Katie from visualizing the story and becoming a part of it. Few other things made sense if you had no idea what Lyra kept popping in and out of.

Last week, Katie was in trouble for playing in Nikki's room when she was supposed to be cleaning her own.

"But Nikki made me play with her," Katie whined.

I told interrupted her firmly.

"Katie, Nikki doesn't MAKE you do anything. You need to take responsibility for your own choices."

I like the way that sounded.

Take responsibility for your own choices.

I liked it so much, I repeated it to Katie several times throughout the next three days, hoping to drill the concept in.

It wasn't until I'd repeated it several times that Katie finally asked, "Mom, what does 'responsibility' mean?"

Crap! Not again.

My golden words of wisdom were falling, well : nowhere, except into the limbo of my own sense of self-importance.

There I was again, patting myself on the back of the beauty of my delivery when a very salient point hit me right between the eyes. It doesn't matter how fluid, how moving, how eloquent the speech is if there's nobody there to hear it.

And frankly, when your audience doesn't understand what you're saying, you might as well be talking to no one.

That's a huge piece of effective communication - dialogue. You need to ask questions, not just deliver sermons.

Again, the teacher becomes the student. I learn a lot from kids. For example, I'm WAY overrating my communication skills.