Improving Interpersonal Communication: Personal Experience

Improving Interpersonal Communication
Over the course of these last five weeks in this class I have taken a variety of inventories and learned more about myself through them. The first one I did was to show growth throughout the course. In most of my scores for this assessment I grew from the first time I took it to the second time. I attribute this growth to time, this course, and the college learning and growth environment I am in currently. I do have to take into consideration that when I took this assessment the first time I do believe I was in a bad mood so some of the perceived growth could be due to that outside factor. I have also experienced more since then and talked to people who are close to me to learn more about myself. Which, …show more content…
I still think that is true because I only think I cannot change when I am down or feel stuck. I think I can change because I have changed in the past and will probably change again in the future. Sometimes the change is easy and others it is hard but possible. I felt more optimistic this time around, so I gave myself a higher score, although really it is about the same as it was. For the next question about dealing with stress I ranked myself higher than before as well. In a few weeks I have learned to deal with stress better and preventing it. I have spoken to a few people in these weeks that have helped me with dealing with stress. I have learned that if I know I have time to finish all my assignments it is not necessary to stress as much as I usually because that just hurts me more and leads to more procrastination. I would say that is why my answer differed for number four. Question five dealt with how I view my ability to cope with crises. I did not change in this one since I have not had to deal with any new actual crises lately and thus have not yet had the chance to see if there was any growth there. Next, was relating to my personal relationships between friends and my significant other. …show more content…
I felt that is something I should do to improve my communication skills since sometimes I feel I am too harsh when I do criticize someone. He also said something to the extent of remember the person you are taking to has feelings to and things you say will be taken emotionally, basically meaning your words have meaning to others. That is something I have been learning recently but need to remember more often because in the past I neve felt like anyone listened or cared what I said so I would just say whatever I wanted. The author of the article also mentioned to make sure avoid “value judgements” or judging the other persons values or opinions. Doing so would only lead to the person not discussing those things in the future. That is something I need to do more often because some of my values are very set in with me and when others bring up a different opinion I get shocked and wonder why they would think that. I see now this may affect me from having some deep relationships. He also said risk letting others know that you have vulnerabilities. That I something that I struggle with I really am not good at letting people in on my insecurities or personal things that I struggle with. He said it was good to take the risk though because they are likely to either relate to it or understand you as a person better