Interpersonal communication is an exchange of information between two or more people. It is also an area of study and research that seeks to understand how humans use verbal and nonverbal cues to accomplish a number of personal and relational goals.
Hari Subba
To- Mr. Keith Radley
Interpersonal Communication
12/07/2017
Reflective Writing
English is my second language. Leaning the new language and try to learn new stuff along with I find as a challenge for me. I attend this Interpersonal Communication class and learned the material as much I can per my level best. So far I have loved my entire communication course and the text books since I purse my career in marketing communication field. My current Interpersonal Communication professor is very knowledgeable about the subject matter and share his lot of personal life experience in his lecture which easily grab my attention and more interesting three hours class. Biggest this learned from him, He is not a only good professor he is also a kind human being who understand people problems and give a chance to improve and encourage to be better hardworking person and never give up. In this course I learned many different aspects from understanding nonverbal and interpersonal communication. Throughout the semester I jot down the notes every class to apply the knowledge and information discussed in class to my personal experiences. My notation was for my better understanding of the material covered in class and give example experiences that related to the material. From this course I have discovered more information about interpersonal communication and being able to deal with conflict from my own experiences. The final paper I wrote was about the personal change habit which plays major roles in my daily life and especially in my work place with my co-worker. It is about understanding others, Focus good thing on them and Stop, Look and Listen. These are the strategy I implement to build the relationship with my coworker throughout the semester.
In my view Interpersonal communication teach us our ability to communicate well with others is important to personal and professional success. The interpersonal communications course is planned to help us in being familiar with the system of effective, and to assess our own interpersonal ability to sharpen our critical understanding of the communication, also to improve the interpersonal skills. Mainly assess our interpersonal skills and to put in goals for improving our communications ability. To development of self-concept and identity are examined as basics for understanding personal communication. We explore our own communication behaviors and to identify areas of personal strengths and determination.
I have encountered during my first community placement I had the opportunity to develop my communication skills not just theoretically but also practically, facing a real life environment. My placement made me aware of the importance of interpersonal and communication skills which are very important in the delivery of care. Throughout my Marketing Communication career, I will be encouraged to develop reflective practice skills and working in a Marketing field.
After learning about the various aspects that play major roles in interpersonal communication, I have a better understanding of what interpersonal communication consists of. Lastly, I am able to apply the knowledge from this course to my own personal experiences.
Hari Subba
To Professor- Mr. Keith Radley
COMM 2110
Relational Change Project
Final Report on Relational Change
Overview
My final report for my relational change project consists of effortful work and skills I have applied throughout the semester. My initial goal was to improve my quality of verbal and nonverbal communication skills with my coworker Jen and among others peers too -while being as much other people oriented as I possibly could. Learning to interpret the verbal cues of others was something I wanted to accomplish as well. To reach my goal, I used three strategies from the class textbook, Interpersonal Communication: Relating to others, that included understanding, focus, Improve listening and responding skills, body orientation, and physical appearances. As a result, I have experienced very many improvements in my daily communication interactions with her. For the most part, my results were quite positive. However, as with any new skill, there is certainly room for improvement. One of my goals for the future is to continue applying my new communication skills into practice in other areas in life with family, relatives, friends and peers, such as in professional and personal, and in other context settings.
Unwanted Communication Pattern
On typical settings, I have the tendency of lacking eye contact especially when meeting new person. Because I am bit shy and lack of confidence, sometime I get social anxiety. Without giving it too much thought, I often find myself displaying
little to no body language. Changing this bad comm habit is a must because displaying poor verbal communication can lead to misinterpretations, confusion, and even cause an unnecessary negative impression on myself. The following are two examples of why my unwanted communication habit gets in the way of my usual interactions with other people. Task oriented listener are interested in focusing more on achieving a specific cout come or accomplishing a task then on focusing on the communication relationship when the listen to others. (Beebe, 2017, pg. 120).
Strategies
As I identified my unwanted communication habits, I decided to change this communication habit using my knowledge of the class lectures and textbook. The following are communication strategies that I have used throughout the semester, which have helped me gain ample skills to become proficient at my ability to communicate verbally. Developing empathy, and particularly the skill of understanding others, is not just important to your interpersonal relationships. It has been made a wider impact to me.
My first strategy was definitely improving the quality of my understanding (Stage 3 of the listening define Beebee pg 118) of my coworker’s words by asking her clarification her particular opinion (Personal change proposal). I by becoming an attentive listener and other oriented communicator with Jen (Co-worker). I am so happy that I used my strategy number one very important and crucial. I leaned to take my time to listen to her instead of giving up soon and being defensive to her. Doing this I did able to have a friendly interaction and able to help each other as per the need. I stop being quick responder; I started listening more and pay attention to details rather than just talking with assumption. There is one of my favorite saying “When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.” -Dalai Lama. I think it is very true statement usually whatever I said those are best of knowledge but if I hear some else they might have different idea then me.
My second strategy was I will give more focus on what my coworker is saying instead of became defensive working on developing good eye contact with her. By observing researcher Adam Kendon’s four functions of eye contact in interpersonal interactions, I would develop a broader understanding of the importance of keeping good eye contact in verbal communication. There are four types of listening styles they are Relational oriented listening style, Analytical oriented, critical and task oriented (Beebe, 2017, pg. 120). I have read very deeply and analysis these listening types. Listening is one of the most important skills we can have. How well we listen has a major impact on your job effectiveness, and on the quality of your relationships with others. we listen to obtain information, What's more, we'll avoid conflict and misunderstandings. Definitely helps me improve relationship with my colleague Jen.
My third strategy was I will use the Stop, Look, and Listen (Beebe, 2017, pg 126-127) tactic to become a more other-oriented listener. It is always good to be multi task. But it doesn’t help always. I have own saying that I think often. If we put the legs in two boats there is possible fell and able to reach the destination. I have learned how and when to implement stop, look and listen action in appropriate circumstance. I used this tactics lot while I am writing my journal. I believe that doing so would help me communicate my genuine feelings, mood, and attitude at any given moment cluded in my goals was my desire to become other-oriented and to communicate effectively with my coworker with verbal characteristics. What I learned was to become a skilled listener, I must know how to identify both the major and details of a message by doing- ask myself, identify the overall emotional tone of the message, identify the specific skills and finally links the details I hear with the person seems to be a speaker (Beebee 2017 pg. 128 Improving your comm skills).
Constraints
As I was attempting to put my newly acquired knowledge into practice, I did ran across a couple of constraints. I would say that my most difficult constraint was actually getting into the habit of putting my new skills into practice. Even though I was very aware of my own fault and of lacking the ability to use verbal communication in my daily interactions with my coworker, I still found a hard time trying to implement them into action. The hardest part was probably trying to recall information from the textbook and utilizing the three strategies about how and when to use in verbal communication codes to communicate with my colleague. Because I didn’t have any references whatsoever, knowing the information from memory was a bit of a challenge—especially when I had other things going on in my head as far as my academic career and personal social life. Another constraint that I frequently found was that there weren’t very many nonverbal communication techniques readily available for me to practice. The majority of the skills I learned came from Chapter 5 Listening and Responding Skills.
Implementation
As I began to implement my new strategies about person change, I decided that the first thing was to make the effort of reviewing my verbal and nonverbal communication skills before putting them into practice. For instance, as I read through the textbook I tried to keep mental notes about the information that was applicable in my verbal and nonverbal communication strategies. I was able to keep a weekly journal, where I recorded significant experiences about my new strategies. Putting my skills into action was certainly not an easy task for me especially in the beginning. Since I am go almost three weeks due to my life event, Fortunately, with time and plenty of reviews, I was able to recall information about using my verbal communication cues that essentially helped me put them into practice. I implemented a numbers of strategies for getting into the habit of using verbal communication in my interactions with others. The following are some examples of specific strategies I used. As listed in my personal change proposal, I used different types of visual communication to develop the habit of interacting with my coworker. On two occasions, I remember using affect displays and regulators which helped me manage the flow of the conversation and actually use physical body movement to communicate my intended purpose. I remember that my efforts were successful as I managed to add a little more meaning to my interpersonal interactions with my fellow co-worker and religious companionships. I will give more focus on what my coworker is saying instead of became defensive.
Although this strategy may seem like a relatively easy, mindless concept to practice focus and is one of the most useful strategies for verbal and nonverbal communication. Of course, I practiced this type of method mostly under work situations. Speaking with my co-worker, I felt like I improved other areas too such as comprehension skills. A challenge that I encountered was trying not to dart over my co-worker head as there were many distractions. But overall, I was able to surpass the challenge and focus on the element of the message (Beebe, 2017, pg. 122-123).
Other examples of my Stop, look and Listen, verbal and nonverbal communication strategies include displaying genuine facial expressions. Because people often unconsciously think about facial expressions, I think this was one of the most important aspects of verbal and nonverbal cues used to determine one’s emotions. Using this strategy in my social and even religious environments was especially important. Expressing genuine facial expressions while talking with her helped me better communicate my messages and intentions overall. As mentioned previously, controlling my facial expressions was one of my goals, and as I continue to interact with her I come to continue learning forms of better implementing this strategy
oved quite a lot with posture, as I tend to walk straight and with confidence.
Results
As I implemented the strategies and worked hard on changing my unwanted bad communication habits, I can definitely say that the results have been positive. The classroom textbook, and my instructor Mr. Keith, have been an extremely useful tool for teaching me the material specifically for changing my unwanted habit. He is knowledgeable about the subject matter and with his expertise, I truly inspired and learned a lot from his personal and professional advice and lectures. The change in my communication styles has allowed me to better express myself in terms of verbal communication, since this type of communication tends to be what people most likely believe. Although the communication strategies that I have used were not very theory-based, the simplicity and applicability of the strategies were very plausible to work on with.
Recommendations
Because I have seen very good results with implementing verbal and nonverbal communication strategies in my daily interaction with my co-worker Jen, I definitely want to continue putting my new skills into practice. Specifically, I plan to focus my new Interpersonal communication skills in workplace, business, family and spiritual settings, as well as in my education-related future career.
Works Cited
Steven A Beebe, Susan J. Beebe, and Mark V. Redmond. Interpersonal Communication: Relating to Others. Eight edition. N.p.: Pearson Education, 2017. Print.
