Communication Skills are revered to be the key to success. It is true for an individual, teams, organizations, and relationships. Over time you can improve your skill to communicate and leave an impression on everyone you interact with. However, when you take the car out on the road you are bound to face some bumps and traffic. In a similar way, there are barriers that hinder effective communication. So, what are the barriers to communication? And how to overcome them? Simply put, we can categorize barriers to communication as Internal & External. Internal barriers correspond to hindrances inside of us, including our thinking, attitude, perceptions, as well as the way we communicate . External barriers correspond to hindrances outside of us, including people and environment-related. Let us look at each in detail. Internal barriers – and how they affect communication 1. Incongruent Thoughts: when some other thoughts come to our mind different than the conversation we ar