Personal Communications Review

             The communications review of my personal life including interpersonal, group and organizational communications skills.  I will review in more detail my abilities, my inabilities, what has inspired me and who has inspired me.  I will look into what I have learned during this course through applying theories and approaches and I will cite examples of thoughts and interactions to further show my communications pattern.  Throughout the paper I will also share personal experiences from my family's value and how that influenced my organizational and group communications; I will also talk about how these have affected my dream of earning my degree.

My communications classes began with Aristotle and the rhetoricians.  It has been described that it is important for communications to have a pattern.  The pattern should include ethos, logos and pathos; in essence the persons character, logic and emotion.  I read an article about Aristotle and it said:  “He believed it was an art that could and should be studied and that good rhetoric was not only persuasive, but also ethical. He stated that all public presentations are some balance of three rhetorical proofs: ethos (ethical), pathos (emotional), and logos (logical).  (Fournier, 2011). 

            Before I knew of Aristotle’s teachings, I was inspired by many of Ronald Reagan’s speeches.  President Reagan touched me so deeply when he spoke that in my own talks I referred to Ronald Reagan’s words many times and adopted his speech style.  For me, I trusted what he said, his delivery was honest and credible, he made sense when he reasoned through issues the country had; he was genuine and heartfelt as he expressed himself.  Ronald Reagan’s communications were so effective that from the words of Margaret Thatcher: “he won the Cold War, without firing a shot.”  (Longley, 2005).  This speaks volumes of his effectiveness as a communicator.

             One definition of communication is:  “communication is a process of action on information.” (Trenholm, 2011).  This definitions generality leaves the opportunity to express communications verbally and also allows for nonverbal communications.  For example, in my professional life the main avenue of communication is through a computer over e-mail, at home I am teaching my four year old to learn letters, words and sounds to communicate, and I have trained my Golden Retriever communication through repetition and signals so that he and I have a common language to better understand each other.   

In trying to understand communications better determining whether to use a psychological perspective or a pragmatic perspective depends on the situation.  A psychological perspective is based on an individual’s perspective of what behaviors are true to them; Carl Jung more deeply describes this perspective as: “not just any meaning, but the meaning of those images and ideas which reflect its nature and which originate in the unconscious” (Jung, 2012).  Whereas, the relevance of the pragmatic perspective, would be similar to going to a counselor who could help take the emotion out of the situation and in turn helping communications to be fair and kind.

                Communications also involve reviewing and analyzing personal constructs.  In learning personal constructs it can be acknowledged through patterns that individuals are bound by their own experiences, knowledge and level of understanding as this statement further confirms:  “The whole of the communication process is framed within individuals' cognitive processing abilities.”  (Trenholm, 1986).  I also recognized in reviewing my own adjectives of assessing others I evaluate based on my knowledge and from my own perspective.  Since there is a limitation based on my personal experiences I feel that by going to college I can increase my knowledge of other topics, as well as grow as an individual through education.  I have noticed the difference in responses with more tenured students versus the newer students; tenured students tend to have more breadth to their posts and responses, as well as citing sources more uniformly.  As a newer student I have noticed that my posts and responses are noticeably different and reflect my knowledge, which is much simpler.  I look forward to the day that my communications have more depth, a greater use of language and a more meaningful response. 

In my comparison of newer students and tenured students I have to agree with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  This hypothesis states that “language has powerful affects on the ways we think about and experience the world.  Although we are not completely prisoners of language, it is easy to overlook the extent to which our language habits affect our views of the world.”  (Trenholm, 2011). 

I also have a personal life experience that heavily influenced my language, my actions, and my perception of the world.  Studying the bible is a language that is very difficult to understand, but I spent many hours learning the bible, the meanings in the bible and the meaning of God.  In studying this subject matter this brought a deeper level of understanding in me and in turn influenced my language and my whole perception on life.  The depth gained from this experience enhanced all other areas of my life and gave me a greater knowledge base and brought more complexity to my life.  I cite this phrase:  “In all of this we are to make meaning with others, not in a contest over who is right, but in a context of wanting to know what is right and how we might pursue righteousness together.” (Gore, 2010). 

                In pursuing what is right, I am grateful I was raised in a home with family values.  The family values have given me the guidelines of how to be a team member and ultimately helped me form my role within organizational and group communications.  I work in an environment where team work or group work is essential to the outcome and the success of an account.  I generally work well in a group and take more of a situation approach.  If I am the owner of an account, in our weekly group meetings, I am the leader of the group.  As the leader of the group, I’m generally aware of each member and the skills they possess.  This knowing helps when delegating tasks to individuals for the best results.  If we are synergistic in our interaction, I am more of gatekeeper-expediter; I work to keep open lines of communication and help follow up with members to make sure they are on task.  I am also one to encourage the group and stay positive, taking on a role of encourager. 

Even though I can encourage the group, I am the exact opposite if the group is not working well together or we are unable to keep the focus.  I jump in and become the dominator of the group and become very territorial.  In some instances this has been effective, but most of the times it is overbearing and cuts off communication.  I have learned to back up and more clearly communicate the issues, reset the expectations and get the group and the account back in the direction that is needed to accomplish our end goal.  I read an article pertaining to managing a team and it states that: “emotional intelligence is a type of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to guide one’s thinking and actions.”  (Myers, 2011).            

In learning and reviewing my communications I listed my personal attributes and skills that I’ve acquired.  I love what I do and I believe this affects everything else.  I value and take pride in what I do and I have a work ethic that I am grateful for.  I am genuine and sincere; this allows others the freedom to communicate.  This attribute gives me the confidence to speak freely and comfortably to a CIO and his team or to a person handling a review of products.  I have also acquired work-content skills that enhance my job.  I’ve learned the concept of interdependence and how to be my own person as well as contribute to the bigger picture, my typing skills are exceptional, I am able to prepare high level power point presentations with tables and graphs and communicate the information to a small or large group.  I have the same list of priorities whether I am in the office or whether I am working from home.  I am “always on” with the use of multiple media technologies including my blackberry, iPad, and my laptop.  I also have the ability to stay motivated and on task with my life, career and my education. 

                As I have spent time reviewing and understanding the affects of language and the different means of communications, I have learned from Aristotle to Ronald Reagan that communications is key and by using the rules of ethos, logos and pathos are essential in performing well and appealing to the audience.  In defining communications, a general definition encompasses many different forms of communication and the different avenues that are used on a daily basis.  I learned from exercises in class about my own personal constructs and how I use them when making assessments of other people and they are based around my own personal standards.  The different perspectives of an everyday psychological perspective to using the pragmatic perspective in counseling sessions are valid depending on the person and the experience.  In working to gain a deeper and more complex understanding of life through my personal experiences my life was enlightened by the language of the bible and in college the language differences between newer students and more tenured students.  These understandings solidified my belief in the hypothesis used by Sapir-Whorf that the use of language heavily influences how we view the world.  I learned that the communications used in my family influenced my organizational communications in formal and informal communications.  It also influenced group communications; I take a more situational approach to a group and am the leader of the group, but can also become the dominator if the group is not headed in the correct direction.  I am grateful for my personal attributes; equally I am grateful for the work related skills that I have acquired during my career, for the technology that is available to me and the skills that I have learned.  In using the knowledge that I have gained over my life, as well as using my attributes towards earning my degree, I have found that my focus is now more complex and that I have a deeper understanding of what my degree will mean to my life and my profession.

References:

Fournier, S.  (2011).  © Copyright Stephen M. Fournier Current Date: 11.March.2011.  http://stevefournier01.tripod.com/hist/hist-2.html

Gore, D. (2010). Joseph Smith's Letter from Liberty Jail as an Epistolary Rhetoric. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 43(4), 43-70,242.  Retrieved March 12, 2011, from Research Library. (Document ID: 2218623651).

Jung, C.G. (2012).  Collected Works, Vol. 13, par. 476.  Retrieved February 8, 2013 from http://www.junginla.org/words&images/psychological_perspectives

Laura L Myers, & Mary L Tucker.  (2005).  INCREASING AWARENESS OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE IN A BUSINESS CURRICULUM.  Business Communication Quarterly, 68 (1), 44-51.  Retrieved March 25, 2011, from ABI/INFORM Complete.  (Document ID:  797679351).

Longley, Kyle Mayer, Jeremy D. Schaller, Michael.  (2005). Deconstructing Reagan: Conservative Mythology and America's Fortieth President.  Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.  http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ashford/docDetail

Trenholm, S.  (1986). Human communication theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

http://www.aect.org/edtech/ed1/pdf/04.pdf

Trenholm, S. (2011). Thinking Through Communication (6^th Ed.).  Boston: Allyn & Bacon.http://online.vitalsource.com/#/books