Communication Skills Journal

This journal is composed of five entries made over the course of my 2023 fall semester. Communication is arguably the most important part of the human experience. As social animals, we spend the majority of our time communicating in some capacity. The ways in which we do so are shaped in part by training, education, experience, and context. To communicate in the right ways at the right times is a skill that can affect a person’s life in ways that are not to be underestimated. It is my hope that by reading this journal, my audience might come to understand my approach to communication and the ways in which my education in the fall semester of 2023 has shaped that approach.

Communication Competence

My strengths as a communicator are mostly intrapersonal, interpersonal and group communication. I have a low level of apprehension with voicing my opinions with my coworkers, friends, and family. I’m generally a quiet person, I speak maybe ten times a day at work but when I’m asked for my perspective or feel I have a valuable contribution to make I don’t hesitate to say what I mean. At home I speak much more, often having long discussions with my father about anything and everything.

These assessments did not address intrapersonal communication, but I feel that I am fairly strong in this area as well. I take time to work through my feelings and opinions with myself, dedicating at least ten minutes a day to meditation. I use this time to clear my mind, and at the end of my session I take a few minutes to reflect on any subjects that were recurring in my mind during the practice. Public and mass communication are weaker areas for me. I very rarely use social media, even given the small number of connections I have on my platforms. I wouldn’t mind exposing my written communication to a larger audience, but I do not care for speaking to large audiences. I could lessen this apprehension by writing and rehearsing some speeches, even if I never give the speeches to an audience. I think this would lower my apprehension and get me back into the relative comfort I had with the practice when I was in high school. I was trained to prepare and give speeches, but I manage my natural apprehension in public or mass contexts by thorough preparation rather than immersion.

Perception & Self

I come from a very specific regional subculture defined by voluntary exclusion from a dominant ingroup. That is, I grew up as a non-religious person raised by ex-LDS parents in the heart of Utah. This has affected my perception of others as I constantly attempt to read a person’s relation to the ingroup/outgroup dynamic which affects so many social interactions in my environment. I think this may have diminished my ability to form impressions of people based solely on their presentation. I have decided to work to improve my ability to form impressions of people without being affected by my cultural bias.

My social status and identity as a progressive in a largely conservative environment has led to a tendency to form two distinct strategies of impression management: “acceptable outsider,” and “interesting insider.” That is, when presenting to those who I perceive to be LDS or otherwise socially conservative, I will smooth down the edges of my rhetoric and self-presentation in order to give an impression of fitting within the limits of the dominant conservative ideology, if only just. When presenting to those who I perceive to be outside of the conservative framework, I shape my presentation to be more engaging, authentic, and dynamic. However, outside of the specific region where I spend most of my time I believe that this cognitive framework is less than entirely helpful.

I can afford to be more authentic to my beliefs through my self-presentation in situations with lower stakes, as my self-concept actually aligns well with fairly common values across a good deal of the world. In a way, my dual framework for self-presentation is one which denigrates my self-concept in order to avoid rejection; I think this is an indicator of a weakness in self-esteem. I will work to improve this aspect of my life, forming a more true-to-life self-presentation by bolstering my self-esteem and more fully accepting my self-concept. In short, I will work to improve my self-esteem.

Verbal & Nonverbal Messages

We all make decisions about the way we communicate. Some of these decisions are conscious, others are not. The decision to adapt one’s communication to fit an audience, to increase the effectiveness of the communication in favor of one’s own goals, is one we make every day. The specific content involved in doing so, what counts as a misrepresentation, as disingenuous or a lie, is a question of perspective. What qualifies as an ethical use of those techniques is yet another question. As with any ethical dilemma, there is no single answer which is both consistent and true across every communication scenario. The answers one chooses to abide by in one situation may not apply in another situation in quite the same way, or might lead to an actively harmful result.

I have some friends who struggle with financial security due to disability. One is a man my age who struggles with agoraphobia and bipolar disorder, finding it impossible to hold a job. He is a proud person who finds it difficult to admit to struggling financially, and admitted to me some time ago that he had a bill which he could not meet. I told him that I would lend money to him, and he told me that I would be paid back in around two weeks. I didn’t believe this, but gave the money to him anyway as I like to help my friends and I wouldn’t especially miss the cash. Now, two months later and with no sign of repayment, I don’t bring it up. This is an example which can be viewed effectively through the lens of chronemics. I choose not to react to the passage of time between the money given and the current date, which is a form of nonverbal communication indicating a lack of worry over the repayment. I know that the money would be missed in his home, while it barely touches my radar and certainly isn’t an agonizing sacrifice.

Am I lying by pretending to have forgotten? Was he lying when he told me I would be paid back? Perhaps so, but I consider the situation to be adequately and ethically resolved. If I’d lent the money to someone with plenty to spare, I might be more insulted and see the lapse in repayment as a slight rather than a symptom of struggle. Instead, I talk amiably with him often and never touch the subject. This is a result of my position of privilege as compared to his. I have more privilege in this situation, as I have a full-time position with decent pay which allows me to use money more freely than he can. If he were in a position of higher financial privilege than me, the situation would be quite different and I would expect to be repaid in full fairly promptly.

Listening Skills

I do not believe I am an effective listener. I engage with distractions far too much, I almost constantly have one ear plugged into the internet. Without this, I am actually not bad as a listener. I focus well on the speaker’s meaning and paraphrase often to check my interpretation. However, I believe one must be judged by the sum of one’s strengths and flaws, and by this standard I am not effective. I spend a lot of time listening to audiobooks, podcasts, and hours-long video essays. I’m effective at listening to these, and I’m effective at listening to people face-to-face, but I’m not good at listening to both at the same time and that’s what I do far too often.

I can improve my listening skills very easily, by just removing my earbud and engaging in active listening. In my working life, as I’ve mentioned before, I speak very little. I definitely listen more than I speak in my working life, contributing only when I feel I can add a worthwhile suggestion or improve morale by making a coworker laugh. Listening plays a very important role in my work, as clients often order custom work requiring very specific combinations of cable length, illumination angle, power consumption, and wavelength. At a certain stage of production, these features are impossible to change. It is left to the technician (me) to ensure these features are correct before the point of no return. It is therefore imperative that the technician employs informational listening to very carefully ascertain the client’s needs before beginning work on the product, and remember those needs as production continues.

Interpersonal Communication

Workplace interactions can be tough. There’s so much at stake, sometimes your living is on the line in an interaction with your boss or manager. It only makes sense that these interactions should be given a lot of attention, and that a higher level of filtering and communication competence is required in this context than in others. With friends, I would hope that I can be a more true version of myself than I am at work; and even more so with family. At work, a more professional face is required. I work directly (in person) with both my employer and supervisor. I share a relationship with my supervisor that is far closer to a peer relationship than it is to a supervisor-subordinate relationship. This is possibly due to the immediate presence of our boss at nearly all times, placing the two of us on a similar level of subordination to the “Big Boss.” From my perspective, the nature of this relationship is closest to a Collegial Peer Relationship. We share a low level of personal information and emotional support. For example, our company has a client that gives us a hard time about units which fail after they’ve obviously abused them. This has led to a frustration about this client shared between myself and my coworker, which we commiserate over whenever said client places an order.

In contrast to my “supervisor” Jordan, my employer Valdis has much more present formal authority over me. Our relationship is also far less personal, I know very little about his personal life and he knows as little about mine as I can manage. This is a Supervisor-Subordinate relationship in its purest form. Information transfer is almost completely work-related, and the direction of that information is largely from Valdis to me. I make reports to him and provide feedback on new designs, and he tells me about new orders and relevant information related to production. Understanding the nature of these relationships in a formalized sense can help me to progress relationships to a more personal level, or to maintain a more formal level of interaction as desired.

Summary

In the course of this semester, some shortcomings in my communication style became apparent to me. I have a tendency to avoid conflict by resorting to silence, which does not always result in the best possible outcome. This indicates an avoidant style of conflict management, as described in our class text: “The avoiding style is either passive or indirect, meaning there is little information exchange, which may make this strategy less effective than others.” (Communication in the Real World, 2016, Chapter 6.2) Although I am opposed in principle to engaging in conflict unnecessarily, I think that I could do with changing up my style to better address situations where a more equitable solution can be gained.

 I also tend to half-listen, or to split my attention in ways that are not entirely considerate. I have a habit, as many people my age do, of keeping one ear plugged with an earbud. This is in some ways worse than simply being deaf in one ear. The added element of noise makes listening even more difficult than simply having half of my hearing removed. “It is important to consider noise as a factor that influences how we receive messages. Some noise interferes primarily with hearing, which is the physical process of receiving stimuli through internal and external components of the ears and eyes, and some interferes with listening, which is the cognitive process of processing the stimuli taken in during hearing.” (Communication in the Real World, 2016, Chapter 5.1) This is probably the most damaging habit I have as a communicator, and would take relatively little effort to change by simply removing my earbud when I encounter a situation where verbal communication is likely to occur.

References

Communication in the Real World, 2016 (Author unavailable)

https://open.lib.umn.edu/communication/