Chapter 4 The Self

Chapter 4  The Self

The area of ‘self’ can be explored and widen into 4 types , which is:

(a)    Self-concept

(b)   Self-awareness

(c)    Self-esteem

(d)   Self-disclosure

(a) Self-concept

Self-concept is your image of who you are, it’s how you perceive yourself: your feeling and thoughts about your strengths and weaknesses, your abilities and limitations. There are some components of the self-concept.

(1) Others’ images of you

Looking-glass self: we’d look at the image or ourselves that others reveal to us through the way they communicate with us. We would look to those who are most significant in our life, such as family members, friends, and romantic partners.

(2) Comparisons with others

We compare ourselves with others, most often with our peers. This gives us a clearer idea of how effectively we performed. We will gain different perspectives when we see ourselves in comparison to our peers.

(3) Cultural teachings

Our culture instills in us a variety of beliefs, values, and attitudes about such things as success. Our ability to achieve what our culture defines as success, whereas our failure to achieve what our culture encourages contributes to a negative self-concept.

(4) Self-interpretations and self-evaluations

Self-interpretations are our reconstruction of the incident and our understanding of it. Self-evaluations are the value that we place or the behavior. Self-interpretation and self-evaluation are our standards that apply to our ethical and moral reasoning, beliefs and comprehension and conformity of things around us.

(b) Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is the knowledge of who you are, of your traits, your strengths and limitations, your emotions and behaviors, your individuality, it is basic to all communication. Johari window, is a metaphoric division of the self into four areas.

(1) Open self

This self represents all the information, behaviors, attitudes, and feelings about ourselves that we know and that others also know. This size of the open self varies according to our personality and the people whom we’re relating.

(2) Blind self

This self represents knowledge about us that others have but you don’t. It’s important to reduce our blind self and learn what others know about us.

(3) Unknown self

This self represents those part of ourselves that neither you nor others know. This is information that is buried in our subconscious.

(4) Hidden self

This self represents all the knowledge we have of ourselves but keep secret form others.

We should try to increase awareness of our own needs, desires, habits, beliefs, and attitudes. Here are some various ways:
(a) Listen to others                                          (c) Seek information about ourselves
(b) Increase our open self                              (d) Dialogue with ourselves

(c) Self-EsteemSelf-esteem is a measure of how valuable we think we are. People with high self-esteem think very highly of themselves, whereas people with low self-esteem view themselves negatively. The basic idea behind building self-esteem is what when we feel goof bout ourselves. Here are five suggestions to increase self-esteem.
(1) Attack self-destructive beliefs
-Challenge beliefs you have about yourself that are unproductive or that make it more difficult for you to achieve your goals.
-self-destructive beliefs set unrealistically high standard and therefore almost always lead to failure.
(2) seek out nourishing people
-Nourishing people are positive and optimistic. They also reward us, they stroke is, they make us feel good about ourselves.
-Identification with people similar to us also seems to increase self-esteem.
(3) Work on projects that will result in success.
-We should select projects that will result in success. Each success will help build self-esteem.
-Each success will make the next success a little easier.
(4) Remind yourself of your successes
-We should focus on correct what we did wrong or identify the skills that we need to correct these failures. Focusing on failures can have some positive value.
(5)Secure affirmation
-We should remind ourselves of our successes with self-affirmation that we focus on our good deeds, our positive qualities, strengths, and virtues.

(d) Self-disclosureSelf-disclosure is a type of communication in which we reveal information about ourselves that we normally keep hidden. There are some factors that influence self-disclosure.
(1) who you are-Highly sociable people vs less sociable people
(2) Your culture- Different culture
(3) Your gender- Males vs females
(4) Your listeners- small groups, normally a groups of two people.
(5) Your topic and channel- information that we likely to disclosure

Effective Listening Skills :)

Chapter 3 Listening

Listening is the process of receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken or nonverbal messages.

Why listening is important??
Listening establishes a vital communication component and will serve both task and relationship functions. Effective listening yields a wide variety of benefits, including more effective learning, relating, influencing, playing and also helping.
(a) Listening enables us to acquire knowledge of others, the world, and ourselves, so as to avoid problems and make better-informed decisions.

(b) Attentive and supportive listening also can gain social acceptance and popularity.

(c) Listening can help us change the attitudes and behaviors of others.

(d) Listening can be enjoyable, we share pleasurable thoughts and feeling to others.

(e) Listening often is vital in efforts to assist and help others.

What is the process of listening??
Listening is a five-part process.

Stage 1: Receiving
-In this stage, we receive both the verbal and the nonverbal messages, which mean that not only the words but also gestures, facial expressions, variations in volume and rate and many more. In order to improve reception, we should focus attention on the speaker, look for feedback, avoid distractions, and maintain our role as listener.

Stage 2: Understanding

-Understanding involves learning what the means, not merely what the words mean. This understanding must take into consideration both the thoughts that are expressed and the emotional tone that accompanies them. To improve understanding, we can relate new information to what we already know. Besides, we must see the speaker’s message from the speaker’s point. In will be more perfect if we ask questions and rephrase the speaker’s ideas in our own words.

Stage 3: Remembering

Remember involves retaining the received message, a process that involves considerable reconstruction. Our memory reconstructs the messages we hear and read so it can be remembered for at least some period of time. We can identify the central ideas in a message, summarize the message in a simple ways, repeat names and key concepts and maybe ask questions when in doubt to improve our message memory.

Stage 4: Evaluating

Evaluating is a process of judging messages in some way. Evaluation process goes on without much conscious thought. We may try to evaluate the speaker’s underlying intent. In evaluation, we should try to resist evaluation until we fully understand the speaker’s point view. We should also assume that the speaker is a person of good-will, distinguish facts from inferences, and identify any biases, self-interests or prejudices.

Stage 5: Responding

That are two phases in responding stage, which is responses we make while the speaker is talking and responses we make after the speaker has stopped talking. In this stage, we give the feedback to the speaker. Responses made while the speaker is talking should be supportive and should acknowledge that we’re listening. For effective responding, we should be supportive and express support to the speaker, be honest and state our thoughts and feeling as our own.

What are the common barriers to listening??

(1)    Physical and mental barriers include hearing impairment, noisy environment that will influence us when we are listening.

(2)    Biases and prejudices against groups or individuals who are members of such groups, will invariably distort listening.

(3)    Lack of appropriate focus which mean there are many influences that can lead us astray.

(4)    Premature judgment is assuming we know what the speaker is going to say and that there is no need to really listen.

Styles of Effective Listening

There are five dimensions, which is:

(1)    Emphatic and objective listening, involves the degree to which the listener focuses on feeling what the speaker is feeling versus grasping the objective message.

(2)    Nonjudgmental and critical listening, which mean that the listener listen to the speaker first for understanding and thus evaluates what is said.

(3)    Surface and depth listening meaning that the listener has to do with the extent to which the listener focuses on literal or obvious meanings versus hidden or less obvious meanings.

(4)    Polite and impolite listening dimension refers to the presence or absence of civility and courtesy.
5)    Active-inactive dimension involves the extent to which the listener reflects back and expresses support for the speaker.

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Listening, Culture, and Gender

Listening is also influenced by a wide range of cultural factors, such as differences in language and speech, nonverbal behaviors, credibility criteria, and feedback approaches. Besides, gender also one of the factor which influence effective listening.

 

A little more about perception

A little more about perception.

Chapter 2: Perception

• Perception is an active process and is a continuous process of life - we often perceive things differently and subjectively. Not one person can have the same perception of another perception but even if they do, some things may differ. 
• Perception is the impression that others give you and what you project to others.
• It is the process by which you become aware of objects, events and especially people through your senses. It occurs in five stages: Sensory stimulation occurs, sensory stimulation is organised, sensory stimulation is interpreted-evaluated, sensory stimulation is held in memory, and sensory stimulation is recalled. 

1. Stimulation: At the first stage of perception, your sensory organs are stimulated. Naturally, you don't perceive anything, rather, you engage in selective perception, which includes selective attention and selection exposure. In selective attention you attend to those things that you anticipate will fulfil your needs or will prove enjoyable. In selective exposure you tend to expose yourself to information that will confirm your existing beliefs, that will contribute to your objectives, or that will prove satisfying in some way. 
2. Organisation: At the second stage of perception, you organise the information your senses pick up. One frequently used rule of perception is that of proximity principle, or physical closeness. People or messages that are physically close to one another are perceived together or as a unit. Another rule is closure principle. You perceived as close or complete, a figure or message that is in reality unclosed or incomplete. 
3. Interpreted-evaluated: This step is inevitably subjective and is greatly influenced by your experiences, needs, wants, values, expectations, physical and emotional state, gender, and beliefs about the way things are or should be, as well as by your rules, schemata and scripts. 
4. Memory: You store in memory both your perceptions and their interpretations-evaluations. What you remember about a person or any event isn't an objective recollection, it's more likely heavily influenced by your preconceptions or your schemata about what belongs and what doesn't belongs.
5. Recall: At some later date, you may want to recall or access information you have stored in memory and you may recall it with a variety of inaccuracies: Recall information that is consistent with your schema, fail to recall information that is inconsistent with your schema, and recall information that drastically contradicts your schema. 

Processes influencing perception

Implicit personality theory

- You have your own opinion about someones characteristics of an individual go with other characteristics. This is known as the halo effect. Individuals who have good traits we tend to think they have other good traits as well. 

EG: Susan is cheerful, positive and ( outgoing , shy ).

-There is also the reverse halo effect / horns effect. Individuals who have bad traits we tend to think they have other bad traits as well. 

Potential barriers:

1. Perceive qualities in an individual that your 'theory' tells you should be present when they are actually not.
2. Ignore or distort qualities of characteristics that do not conform to your theory. 

Self-fulfilling prophecy
- Occurs when you make prediction or formulate a belief that comes true because you made the prediction and acted on it as if it was true. Also known as Pymalion effect (which one makes prediction and then proceeds to fulfill it). 
- 4 basics steps in the self-fulfilling prophecy:
step one : You make a prediction or formulate a belief about a person or a situation.
step two : You act toward that person or situation as if that prediction of belief were true.
step three : Because of how you acted towards it, it became true.
step four : You observe your effect on the person or the resulting situation and what you see strengthens. 

EG:  Random students were expected to do exceptionally well. Expectations of teachers caused them to pay extra attention in studies. They did perform higher levels than the other students. And the students became what their teachers thought.

Potential barriers:

1. Influence another's behaviour so it confirms your prophecy. 
2. Distort your perception by influencing you to see what you predicted rather than what it really there. 

Perceptual accentuation

- Lead you to see what you expect to see and what you want to see.you probably see people you like as being better looking or smarter than people you don't like.

Potential barriers:

1. Distort your perception of reality. 
2. Fail to perceived what you do not want to perceived.
3. Influence you to filter out or distort information that might damage or threaten your self-image. For example, criticism of your writing or speaking) and thus make self-improvement extremely difficult.
4. Can influence you to perceive and remember positive qualities better than negative ones and thus distort perceptions of others.

Primary-recency

- Use early information to provide yourself with a general idea of what a person is like. Then use later information to make this general idea more specific. The first impression you make is likely to be the most important, through this first impression others filter additional information to formulate a picture of whom they perceive you to be. 

EG: -intelligent, industrious, stubborn (/)

       - stubborn, intelligent, industrious (x)

Potential barriers: 

1. Tendency to give greater weight to early information in light of these early impressions can lead you form a 'total' picture of an individual on the basis of initial impressions that may not be typical or accurate. 
2. Prevent you from seeing signs of deceit in someone who made a good first impression because of the tendency to avoid disrupting or reversing initial impressions. 

Consistency

- People have a strong tendency to maintain balance or consistency among perceptions.You expect certain things to go together and other things not to go together. 

EG: - I expect my friends to ( like) my friends.

       - I expect my friends to ( dislike ) my enemies.

Potential barriers: 

1. Ignore or distort your perceptions of behaviours that are inconsistent with your picture of the whole person. 
2. Perceived specific behaviours as emanating from positive qualities in people you like and from negative qualities in people you dislike.
3. Lead you to see certain behaviours as positive if other behaviours were interpreted positivity (halo effect) or as negative if other behaviours were interpreted negatively (horn effect).

Stereotyping

- A fixed impression of a group of people. Everyone has attitudinal stereotypes of national, religious group, racial group and others. It can be either positive or negative.

Potential barriers:

1. Perceived someone as having those qualities (usually negative) that you believe characterize the group to which he or she belongs.
2. Ignore the unique of characteristics of an individual and therefore fail to benefit from the special contributions each can bring to an encounter. 

Attribution

- The process through which you try discover why people do what they do and even why you do what you do. They acted this way because of who the person is (their personality) or because of who the person is (their personality) or because of the situation. 

The principle of attribution is 

1. Consensus (Do other people behave the same way as the person on whom I am focusing?)
2. Consistency (Do this person repeatedly behaves the same way in similar situation?)
3. Distinctiveness (Do this person act similar ways in different situations?)
4. Controllability  (Do this person was in control of his/her behaviours?)

Potential barriers:

1. Mind read the motives of another person and confuse guesses with valid conclusions.
2. Self serving bias.
3. Fundamental attribution error. 

Chapter 1: Preliminaries to Human Communication

Benefits and forms of human communication
The benefits of human communication -

•  Communication is the act, by one or more person, of sending and receiving messages that occur within a context, are distorted by noise, have some effect (and some ethical dimension), and provide some opportunity for feedback. 
• Communication study will enable you to improve your presentation skills , relationship skills, interaction skills, thinking skills, and leadership skills. 

1. Presentation skills: Enable you to present yourself as a confident, likeable, approachable, and a credible person. Your effectiveness in just about any endeavour depends heavily on your self presentation.
2. Relationship skills: Enable you to build friendships, enter into love relationships, work with colleagues, and interact with family members.
3. Leadership skills: Enable you to communicate information effectively in small groups or with large audiences and your ability to influence others in these same situation are among your most important leadership skills.
4. Critical and creative thinking skills: Help you to approach new situation mindfully- with full concious awareness, increase your ability to distinguish between a sound and valid arguments and one that is filled with logical fallacies, and your ability to use languages to reflect reality more accurately.
5. Interaction skills: Help you to improve your communication in a wide range of forms, from the seemingly simple talk to the employment interview for the job of a lifetime.   

The forms of human communication: 

The major types of human communication are intrapersonal, interpersonal, small group, organizational, public, computer-meditated and mass communication. 

1. Intrapersonal: communication with oneself. Enhancing self esteem, increasing self-awareness, improving problem solving and analysing abilities, increasing self control, reducing stress, managing intrapersonal conflict. 
2. Interpersonal: Communication between two or a few person. Increasing effectiveness in one to one communication, developing and maintaining productive relationships, improving conflict management abilities. 
3. Interviewing: Communication that proceeds through questions and answers. Phrasing questions to get the information you want, presenting your best self, writing resumes and cover letters.
4. Small group: Communication within a small group (5 to 10) of people. Increasing effectiveness as a group member, improving leadership abilities, using groups to achieve specific purposes (brainstorming, problem solving).
5. Organizational: Communication within an organization. Transmitting information, motivating workers; dealing with feedback, the grapevine, and gossip; increasing worker satisfaction, productivity and retention. 
6. Public: Communication of speaker with audience.Communicating information more effectively; increasing persuasive abilities; developing, organizing styling and delivering messages; becoming a more critical listener. 
7. Computer-meditated: Communication within people via computers. Increasing security in e-communications, combining CMC with face to face communication; networking for social and professional purposes.
8. Mass: Communication addressed to an extremely large audience, mediated by audio and/or visual means. Improving abilities to use the media to greater effectiveness, increasing ability to control the media, avoiding being taken in by the media, becoming a more critical consumer. 

 Elements of human communication
The communication context

• Communication context has at least 4 dimensions: physical, social-psychological, temporal and culture.

1. The physical context is the tangible or concrete environment in which communication takes place.
2. The social-psychological context  includes the friendliness or unfriendliness, formality or informality, and seriousness or humorousness of the situation. 
3. The temporal context  includes the time of the day, the time in history in which the communication takes place and how a message fits into the sequence of communication events.
4. The cultural context has to do with your culture: the beliefs, values and ways of behaving that are shared by a group of people and passed down from one generation to the next.

Source receiver

1. SENDER/ENCODER
The sender also known as the encoder decides on the message to be sent, the best/most effective way that it can be sent. All of this is done bearing the receiver in mind. In a word, it is his/her job to conceptualize.
The sender may want to ask him/herself questions like: What words will I use? Do I need signs or pictures?

2. MEDIUM
The medium is the immediate form which a message takes. For example, a message may be communicated in the form of a letter, in the form of an email or face to face in the form of a speech.

3. CHANNEL
The channel is that which is responsible for the delivery of the chosen message form. For example post office, internet, radio.

4. RECEIVER
The receiver or the decoder is responsible for extracting/decoding meaning from the message. The receiver is also responsible for providing feedback to the sender. In a word, it is his/her job to INTERPRET.

5. FEEDBACK
This is important as it determines whether or not the decoder grasped the intended meaning and whether communication was successful.

6. CONTEXT
Communication does not take place in a vacuum. The context of any communication act is the environment surrounding it. This includes, among other things, place, time, event, and attitudes of sender and receiver.

7. NOISE (also called interference)
This is any factor that inhibits the conveyance of a message. That is, anything that gets in the way of the message being accurately received, interpreted and responded to. Noise may be internal or external. A student worrying about an incomplete assignment may not be attentive in class (internal noise) or the sounds of heavy rain on a galvanized roof may inhibit the reading of a storybook to second graders (external noise).
The communication process is dynamic, continuous, irreversible, and contextual. It is not possible to participate in any element of the process without acknowledging the existence and functioning of the other elements.

Effects

Communication always has an effect which may be cognitive, affective or psycho-motor or a combination.

1. Intellectual (or cognitive) effects are changes in your thinking.
2. Affective effects are changes in your attitude, values, beliefs and emotions. 
3. Psychomotor effects are changes in behaviour.

Principle of human communication

Communication is purposeful 

Communication may serve a variety of purposes, for example, to learn, to relate, to help, to influence, to play. Use your purposes to guide your verbal and non verbal messages. Identify the purposes in the messages of others.

Communication is transactional

The elements in communication are always changing, interdependent, communication messages depends on the individual for their meaning and effect and each person is both speaker and listener. Recognize that messages are influenced by a variety of factors and to understand a person's messages, you need to know the person to some extend. And for others to understand, they need to know you.

Communication is a package of signals

Verbal and non verbal messages work together in 'packages', usually to communicate the same meaning but at other times, different or even opposite meanings. Look for both verbal and non verbal messages for a clearer and more complete understanding of another's meaning. 

Communication is a process of adjustment 

Communication can take place only to the extent that the communicators use the same system of signals. Adjust your verbal and non-verbal messages to the situation and the other individuals. 

Communication involves content and relationship dimensions

Messages may refer to the real world, to something external to both speaker and listener and to the relationships between the parties. Distinguish between content and relationship messages and deal with relationship issues as relationship issues.

Communication is ambiguous

All messages and all relationships are potentially ambiguous. Use clear and specific terms, ask if you're being understood, and paraphrase complex ideas. 

Communication is punctuated

Communication events are continuous transactions, punctuated into causes and effects for convenience. See alternative punctuations when trying to understand another's point of view.

Communication is inevitable, irreversible and unrepeatable 

Messages are (almost) always being sent, cant be communicated and are always unique, one time occurrences. Be careful of what you say; you wont be able to take it back.

The competent communicator

• Communication competence is knowledge of the elements and rules of communication, which vary from one culture to another.
• The competent communicator is defined as one who thinks critically and mindfully, understands the role of power, is culturally sensitive, is ethical, and is an effective listener.