My Communication Style

     Wow!  This one really worried me this week.  I have often been told that I am intimidating and aggressive and this is not something that I am proud of.  I have worked on it a lot and have gotten a lot better as I have aged.  I had my husband, son, and a coworker all take this assessment to see how theirs compared to mine.  I did this because my husband knows me better than anyone on this earth, because my son and I constantly but heads and he states that I am intimidating, and because I wanted to get a perspective from a coworker.
     When I did the self assessments, I got a 44 on anxiety, a 66 on moderate, and a 39 on listening styles.  The anxiety score shows that I have a mild anxiety in some situations and that I am at ease in others and that I don't worry a great deal about communicating.  This is true.  I have spent a lot of years trying to refine the art of communication and I have gotten rather comfortable with communicating effectively.  However, I do get nervous when I have to speak to those that I don't already know well and don't have relationships with.
     The score of 66 put me in the moderate range of verbal aggressiveness and said that this showed a good balance between being respectful and arguing fairly.  It shows that I can attack the facts, rather than the person holding the facts.
     The score of 39 on listing styles did not state which group that would put me in.  Reading through the groups, I feel that I would fall between a group one and a group two.  I am very action oriented, which people can find intimidating.  I am also people oriented, which can cloud proper judgment. 
     Much to my surprise, all three people taking these assessments had scores very similar to mine.  Some of them varied by a couple of points, but I was still in the same boxes.  I learned more by talking to these people, especially my son.  I couldn't believe that his scores for me were not way different than mine, since we disagree so often.  I asked him how this could be, since he always states that I am so intimidating.  He said that I intimidate him because I am so smart!  That really made me laugh out loud.  I am apparently not intimidating to him because I am aggressive.  Rather, he knows that I am going to be tough to argue with because I am no fool!  His teenage manipulations won't work on me.  That really gave me a tickle!  He also always tells me that I don't ever listen, yet his scores did not reflect this about me.  When I asked him about this, he said that what he means is that he can't ever get me to change my mind.  What a little scamp!  My husband and coworker both stated that I am a very strong communicator, but that I am also very kind and very fair.  That made me feel good.  My husband said that people are intimidated by me because I am a good communicator and this leaves people feeling unarmed and worried that they will not perform at the same standards that I set. 
     I am glad that these three feel that I am a good communicator.  However, even my own boss has told me that people find me intimidating.  I want to be a real tough gal communicator, but this does me no good if I am unapproachable or if people are intimidated by me.  My communication goals are to 1. Soften up, 2. Listen more than I talk, and 3. Soften up!

     When I think about different culture groups that I am around, I have to admit that there is really not a wide variety of cultures that I am exposed to.  As a child, I was rarely around those of other cultures.  I live in a very rural town with all white residents.  It always has been that way.  Most of the families are pretty similar.  Of course we are all different, but there is not a wide array of diversity.  I work about 40 miles away and closer to the city.  Where I work, there are people of other languages, ethnicities, languages, etc., but still not anything like the diversity found within cities.  I was going to have a friend of mine (who is African American) watch my eight year old son, but I was very worried.  I figured that he would be like, "Oh, so that is how black people take out their trash"... or, "Wow!  Black people eat chips, too"... or many other things like this.  Not that he has been taught anything negative about other ethnicities, but he has never been exposed to those who are different than him.  It would be a wonderful learning experience for him, but I didn't want to put my friend through that!  My childhood was much like that.  I had no clue how people from other socioeconomic statuses, religions, ethnicities, sexual orientations, etc. lived because I was never able to build relationships with people from other cultures because my town is so rural, Christian, and white.
     I do talk to people from other cultures differently.  I talk to children in a louder tone and in a very sing song voice.  I constantly touch them, pat their backs, and rub their arms and backs as I talk to them.  I have some Christian friends that I don't cuss around and some fellow cursing friends that I cuss like the devil around!  I am open and honest with my husband, but not so with others.  I am a professional business woman at work and I use a lot of logic over emotion.  When I am with my family, I use more emotion than logic.  I have a loud, boisterous friend and I notice that I get loud and boisterous when I communicate with her.  I think that we start learning at a young age (from our experiences) the different ways that it is considered to be acceptable to communicate with others.  We also catch on to the ways that others wish for us to communicate with them and also we learn what seems to be effective.  This means adapting the way that we communicate, based on who we are communicating with.

 

 
       This week, the assignment was to watch a segment of a show with the sound turned off and then watch it again with the sound turned on.  I decided to watch part of an episode for Fuller House.  My children have been watching it and I had yet to see an episode.  So, I turned off the volume.  The character of Kimmie entered the house with a really good looking man.  I tried really hard to figure out what they were talking about, but I couldn't.  The man's facial expressions showed a lot of confusion and showed that he felt like what she was saying didn't make a lot of sense.  Kimmie goes upstairs and DJ walks in.  She face shows shock that someone is in the house, but then she smiles and sticks her hand out for a handshake.  I could tell by the exchange between the two that they were making introductions.  DJ talks to this man and I can tell that she is telling him to follow her upstairs.  The man seems confused and I could tell that there was some mistake made; that DJ had made an incorrect assumption as to why the man was at the house.  He follows her upstairs to the bathroom and starts to take off his shirt.  She looks horrified and shocked and puts her hands up to tell him to stop.  When I go back and watch it with the sound on, I see that Kimmie brought this man home from a dating service to meet DJ.  DJ had called a plumber to fix the toilet and when she walks into the room, she assumes that this is the plumber.  Although I could tell that there was a huge misunderstanding from watching without sound, I really didn't know what the misunderstanding was about, until I watched with sound.  I was amazed at just how much I really could pick up without the verbal aspect.  The verbal communication helped to really fine tune my understanding and provide greater detail, but I pick up the basics of what was transpiring, just by watching facial expression and body language.

Effective Communicator
     When I think of a person in my life that I feel is a wonderful communicator, I think of our Human Resources consultant at work.  I find that I think of someone that is better at certain things than I am.  This woman is always fair.  She is always calm.  She listens well and waits until someone is done talking.  She even jots things down as you speak, so that she can remember to come back to things that you have said after you are done talking.  She is kind and she remains objective.  Most of all, she can speak very calmly and never lets emotions overtake her.  I think that this is what I struggle with the most.  I often become very emotional and this causes me to behave in ways that make me completely ineffective as a communicator.  Once I become emotional, I have lost any ground that I might have had to be able to communicate effectively.  This woman that I speak of never becomes emotional.  She is kind, calm, fair, unbiased, professional, unemotional, and listens very well.  These things are all things that I feel make her a very effective communicator and someone that I would like to be able to model when I need to communicate with others.