In the class, I was given an elaborate overview of interpersonal relationships. I was taught about the different impacts of interpersonal relations on an individual and how these can determine his personality, quality of lifestyle and the status of his relations with those related to him personally and professionally. I was also given an idea about human communication, the chief features of human communication and its major determinants.
The class also gave me an idea on how can I identify the strengths and weaknesses of my personal interpersonal relationships and how can I implement ways that can rectify my weaknesses and help me in redesigning my personality. I believe that the class notes will be of immense help in the personal as well as professional aspects of my life. Interpersonal Dimensions i) Strength After going through the class lectures and notes, I have analyzed that my interpersonal effectiveness lies in the fact that I am a great provider of feedback.The way in which I deliver my instructions and the way I train my teammates to function as per the instructions have always proved successful.
Thus, I believe that I have the basic skills of a good team leader and qualities to mould my teammates to agree upon one common goal and one universal idea by virtue of my verbal skills. I am well aware of the fact that the basic skills of a good speaker is to be concise and clear while delivering instructions and stick to time frame, and most importantly, stick to the verbal deliverables that have relevancy with the topic that needs to be talked about (Memorial University Of Newfoundland, 2004).I keep these in my mind wherever I am assigned any task of delivering an instruction. Consequently, my audiences find these feedbacks easy to understand and convenient to follow.
I also make it a point to show my confidence whenever I deliver any instruction, as I believe that the basic characteristic of a good speaker is that he/she should depict his/her mastery on the subject and inherent ability to do justice with it. Thus, as a part of my homework I make it a point to practice, speak and correct myself several times at home before I finally deliver my verbal feedback at the intended event.I wish to mention here that I believe that a great way to show that I am confident about my work is to go slow. Hence, I speak slowly and also give occasional pause after words and sentences, some of which are a bit longer while others are shorter. This makes my verbal feedbacks look natural and not robotic.
Moreover, those who are listening to me distinctly hear all of the words that I utter. A practical instance of when my skills as a good giver of feedback was proved was when I was assigned that task to role play as a team leader and instruct the teammates to take up subjective tasks as per my instructions.I was able to execute the task given to me perfectly well and won applause. This was a testimony of my skills. ii) Challenge Self-analysis of my personality traits has made me realize that I am not a good listener.
Whenever I am supposed to be a listener when someone else is speaking, I become impatient after some time. This is especially prevalent when the speech drags too long. To be honest, I fail to hold the uniformity of concentration all throughout the verbal message that gets delivered to me by a different person.Consequently, I lose the tract of the introduction and conclusion of such verbal feedbacks that are delivered to me. Sometimes it so happens that my inattentiveness gets reflected in my facial expressions too.
As a result, the speaker or those present around me either detect a lost look in my face or find me busy fidgeting with some trivial thing. The matters become even worse when I am assigned the task of serving as a team member under a team leader. My inattentiveness towards such verbal instructions makes me a failure in executing the task in the way I am supposed to perform.I admit that this weakness in my interpersonal skills have reflected in an adverse manner in my professional and personal front. A personal incident that I wish to put up here is that I was supposed to be a listener in a live project on interpersonal skills. My task was to receive the feedback supplied to me by a speaker in the perfect manner that the speaker would deliver to me, not compromising with any part of the verbal information.
Then, my next task was to decode the message and deliver the exact feedback in my personalized style to my peer mates, and assign them separate role-playing tasks accordingly.But my weaknesses in this case made me unsuccessful. Since the verbal information concerned skilled tips on personality development, my inattentiveness made me retrieve partial information. Moreover, most of this partial information was also faulty and out of context. The consequence is quite evident; I delivered incomplete and incorrect feedback to my peer mates and could not assign them the specific tasks I was asked to do, and thus proved myself a failure in the project. The humiliations I received and the embarrassments I felt due to the incident testify how incompetent I am as a listener.
Based on my class teachings I have noted down five distinct conflict styles. I am now supposed to categorize my personal conflict style by making an assessment of my inherent personality. I believe that my character trait is that I have an openness to accept changes, no matter it is in the personal front or in the professional front. Instead of acting too rigid, I maintain a flexible attitude, and believe that certain compromises and adjustments not only prevent a relationship from breaking apart permanently but also help an individual to learn and rectify his/her own faulty traits. I cannot indulge into self-criticism at all.Rather, it will be rightly said that at times I fail to realize where I went wrong and why I am being criticized.
But my openness towards criticisms of my personality and interpersonal skills by others helps me to realize my weaknesses at a later stage. I have learnt that in addition to a greater willingness to experimentations, more open individuals tend to have a broader range and depth of experience. Their positive reception to things that are novel combined with their greater range of experience enables them to derive novel solutions to problems and creative ideas that challenge the status quo (Mc-Crae, 1987).The class also taught me that openness in personality give greater scope for divergent thinking in an individual that goes a long way in serving as a major tool for making self criticism. Thus, a person with such a type of conflicting style will have a greater knowledge on how to resolve internal as well as external conflicts and draw an amicable solution to a problem.
Another benefit of this character trait is that an individual with such a flexibility of mind does not suffer from physiological setbacks and severe frustration at all in occasions when his/her weaknesses get publicly revealed.Rather, the person gathers the internal strength to take it as a challenge to rectify the flaws, gather information to improve on it and get over such weaknesses with time. Since individuals with this distinctive character trait, openness, maintain a liberal attitude towards the ideologies and arguments of others so they are believed to be more cultured and more patient than those who do not possess this skill set. A person can have a present notion that is actually erroneous, and I believe that this is quite humane and common for all.
But a person with an open mind has the heart to accept this and realize that he/she had been pursuing a false notion so far. As a consequence, his/her success in a relationship connected with his/her professional sphere and personal front remains more uniform, transparent and healthier in contrast to that of a rigid person. One more thing that I learnt about the advantage of this distinct character trait is that open-minded persons are popular with their peers and find themselves being more depended upon.However, I even learnt that openness does not have a perennially happy outcome. There are instances when such people suffer too.
The openness in the attitude of certain individuals is often taken for granted by those around him/her. Sometimes they do not mind insulting such open minded people too as they know that the repercussion will never be anything that will be out of control. Even, openness of an individual often stands in the way of others who are too rigid in their perspectives and people belonging to the former category are often avoided as a result.There are times when openness of character result in outspoken attitude, which creates unprecedented situations. Actually, most people hate to rely upon people who are amalgamations of openness and outspokenness. I realized that I have the combined character traits of openness and outspokenness that I must rectify, or else I will gain unpopularity among my circle of personal and professional associates.
I have personally witnessed that some of my friends avoid me in situations where they feel my presence will be vulnerable for them.Some of them have even complained that this typical attitude of mine have landed them in situations of misunderstanding and domestic conflict in their family. So, I am trying to correct my attitude. I was given instructions of this particular matter by the class. I was asked to be a silent observer and not a speaker every time.
To be precise, the class advised me not to implement my conflicting style together with my interpersonal traits. While the strong attribute of my personality features my skills as a great giver of information or speaker, my conflicting style is openness.Now when these combine together they make me too outspoken, which appears detrimental at times instead of serving any good. I was also instructed to make comments in situations where I am asked to do so and refrain from giving opinions or informing anything to anyone where I am not supposed to because unnecessary involvement will stain my reputation. Another tip that I got from my class is that I should rather try to act neutrally in most of the situations instead of showing partiality to any party by leaking out information on something that can prove harmful for others.
Although it will not be easy to follow all the instructions word to word right instantly, I understand that my willingness to correct my ways will help me in handling the situations in the exact manner that class has instructed me to do in the coming days. Conclusion While attending the class on interpersonal communication skills I have learnt that the relationship between a giver of information, a receiver and a stimulus that exists in the form of a verbal message, is actually closer to mathematical calculations.When the calculations fall perfectly well and in the exact order as they are supposed to appear, the chain of communication ranging from encoding a message after collecting it from a source, giving the message to the listeners in the exact manner as it has been retrieved, the task of decoding the retrieved message by the receivers and interpreting it exactly in the way it had been delivered completes a successful cycle of communication.So, enhancing the strengths of an individual’s interpersonal skills and overcoming the weaknesses aid in the process of a complete communication that do not compromise with the quality at any stage at all.
However, the nature of conflicting attributes present in an individual also acts as a vital factor. It can either improve the overall interpersonal characteristic of an individual or deteriorate it further.
