Interpersonal Communication - Essay Example

Interpersonal Communication Reflection Paper Introduction: Interpersonal Communication primarily refers to the face to face interaction with near and dear ones as well as the professional communications within an organization. It is the communication that creates a conversation between two or more individuals. It also reflects the personal nature and character of the individuals and describes their participation in the maintenance of social relationships (Hartley, 20). The current paper presents a reflection on the interpersonal communication and its need in meeting needs of individuals, identifying scripts and studying perception through examples from the real life communications. Meeting Individual Needs through Communication: Keeping a track on the various interactions that I was involved in over a period of three days, I realized the significance of effective interpersonal communication between different individuals. For example, I realized the need for communication in my basic physical needs when I had to convey my message of being hungry to my mother. The message took little time to be conveyed since I just had to go to my mother while I was at home and express my need. I realized my communication need for safety when I was returning home along with a friend. Since he was not feeling well, I told him that I would drive the car back home. In regard to the belonging needs, I realized communication meeting our needs as I spent a whole evening with my close friends chatting with them on various subjects. The communication needs in fulfilling self esteem got reflected when my father once called me and introduced me to one of his esteemed friends and presented me in a highly respectable manner. In these three days, I also realized the communication in self actualization when one of my relatives saw a writing of mine and suggested me that I should take up writing professionally. That motivated me to a great extent. All these conversations had taken place face to face. The surprising part of these incidents was that all these communications happened within few moments yet stressed on the fact as to how they fulfill our needs. Identity Scripts: In my family, I have been brought up not under too much of restrictions or authoritative attitudes from my parents. Rather, at all points of time, my parents would discuss with me regarding the decisions taken in the family or any concerned issue and make me feel part of their decisions. Thus the parenting style that I can relate my parents to is a permissive style. Owing to this, my communications reflect an independency although with self-discipline in it. When my friends asked me to join them at a late night party, I informed my parents and they did not object to it. I have always heard my parents talking about me and saying that I would decide my career according to my choices and they would not force their wishes on me. Thus the identity scripts that the communication from my parents reflects imply to me that they always wanted me to be an independent individual capable of taking decisions. Their communication has had a huge effect on the way I carry myself today. My near and dear ones also know me as an independent and mentally strong person. I take my decisions on my own with all due respect to my dear ones and I believe that the communication expressed by my parents and through their parenting styles have greatly influenced my positive nature of living. Perception: I also realized the need for proper communication in relation to the perception that I used to carry at different situations and for different people around me. Since I greet all my friends with a hug whenever I see them, I had a perception that it was a correct and acceptable way of greeting friends around me. However I did not try to distinguish between people in order to understand any kind of differences that might be occur in different situations. I realized this in these three days of my experiment when in a morning I met a new girl and we became friends. When in the evening we saw each other, without any second thoughts in my mind, I gave her a hug. However, this time the reaction was different. She got angry with me thinking that my intentions regarding her were wrong. It was then that I realized that perceptions might not work in the same manner in all situations; hence the communication also depends accordingly. Culture influences perception to a great extent since it is the cultural value, principles, that an individual has learnt from his childhood that gets reflected through his communication. What he speaks is what he has learnt all over his life. Thus culture plays an important role in shaping the communication patterns of individuals. In order to perform a perception checking, I planned to follow the three steps (description, interpretation, and clarification) if a suitable situation arose. It happened with my elder brother. I suddenly found he was not responding to whatever I was telling him. Initially my perception was that he was upset with something but I planned to use the technique. Thus the description for me was that he was not responding to my words. My interpretations were that either he was upset for his own reasons or he was upset with me. Then I decided to clarify and asked him directly about the matter and solved it thereby preventing any kind of misunderstanding. Conclusion: From the experiment on interpersonal communication that I conducted for the three days, the most important thing that I learnt is that communication is a very essential part of our day-to-day lives and depending on situations, and needs, it varies as well. Also, our culture, our prior perceptions are factors that greatly influence what and how we communicate to a person. I have also found that the most effective communication occurs when an individual communicates face-to-face to another individual. Thus from the overall study, I realized the importance of even the minutest communications that we perform each day and accordingly one needs to understand situations, needs and communicate to others. References 1) Hartley, Peter, Interpersonal communication, London: Routledge, 1999 Read More