Communication Week 4

·         Blog Assignment: Week 4<p>

 

 

This week our job was to observe ourselves as communicators and also have others evaluate us as a communicator. I will be the first to admit that it can be hard to be truly honest when self evaluating. We are either too hard on ourselves or make things up to look better in other people’s eyes. The people I had evaluate me were my daughter and a co-worker.My daughter was very honest with how I communicate and I like that she didn't hold anything back from me. She helped me to see that as I have gotten older I have become more outspoken and this tends to get me in trouble sometimes. I definitely noticed that I was harder on myself than they were on me by the scores I received. While I was taking the tests I was really surprised at how I was scoring myself because I didn’t think I was aggressive in any way towards others when talking to them. I do admit that as I have gotten older I have become more vocal and not always in a good way. This class is making me take a closer look at how I communicate with people I know well and people I have more casual interactions with. After going through these tests I can see how imperative it is that I build better communication skills in my professional interactions. I do see that I have differences with communicating with adults and children. Most of the time I am pretty good with children but not with adults when it comes to communicating effectively. One area that I would like to share is how I communicate with people from different cultures, I have noticed that I get impatient when I don’t understand something and try to change the topic to something that is easier for me. This is not fair to them and I have tried to overcome it and work towards really listening to what they have to say and learning from what they have to tell me. The other thing that I found is my interactions between professionals and family-I know these two are very different types of communicating but I need to be cognizant of being empathetic with both groups and not getting frustrated and become an aggressive communicator. I know if I continue to learn from my mistakes I will become a better communicator.