Our Prsonal Communication Skills

Our Personal Communication Skills

Communication is an extremely important and mandatory part of our human connection, and it is surprising how many areas, types, and levels makes up communication. We each have a perception of ourselves of how we think we communicate and how others feel we communicate. The results of a communication survey revealed some surprising information and some not so surprising about my communication skills. The survey measured communication anxiety, verbal aggressiveness, and listening styles. I scored myself pretty high in the verbal aggressiveness scale, but a colleague and a family member scored me even higher on this same scale. I scored myself low in the communication anxiety area, and my family member and colleague scored me low in this area too but a little higher than I scored myself. Surprisingly, I scored myself sort of in the middle but on the lower side of the listening styles profile, and my family member and colleague scored my listening styles a few points just under my number. This experience was very eye-opening for me, because sometimes we think that we are doing a sufficient job in areas that we may need a little more guidance in. Although my scores weren’t bad they still enlightened me and will help me in my personal life and in my profession as an educator of young children and a helper for their parents.

The two insights about communication I gained are in the area of “Cognitions about Ourselves”. For the need for cognition scale I scored a 58 which falls under the high need for cognition which explains that I “enjoy the thinking process and are self-motivated to apply my thinking skills to a variety of situations”, also that I “select important information and tend to be conscientious and open to new experiences” (O’Hair, Wiemann, Mullin, & Teven, 2015). The second area of insight for me from this study is “Self-Denigration”, which is the practice of “criticizing or attacking yourself when communicator’s over emphasize their weaknesses or shortcomings” (O’Hair, Wiemann, Mullin, & Teven, 2015).

 How many times have we said to ourselves when we made a mistake or missed the mark “I’m so stupid”, or “that was so dumb of me”? I have noticed this about myself a few years ago and decided to be watchful of this type of abuse of myself, and I have been teaching it to my friends and colleagues by not allowing them to say these types of words to themselves. This ability of awareness will be extremely helpful in my profession of working with young students and their families, because this type of self-abusive behavior is so common and we can create a chain reaction putting a stop to this type of behavior.

Reference

O’Hair, D., Wiemann, M., Mullin, D. I., & Teven, J. (2015). Real communication (3^rd. ed).

     New York: Bedford/St. Martins.