Defensive interaction

After reading the Gibb's Defensiveness-producing communication behaviors, I figured out that like most of us, I am also impatient and sometimes it is hard to make decisions. It is not because I am not grown up or anything related to that, but rather lack of confidence. I tend to take everything personally and act defensive. For example, last week I was with my friends and we were talking about how cultural values are important. One of my friends, Arshpreet, is born and raised in America but his ethnicity is Asian Indian. He follows his religion which is the reason he has grown his beard and hair, he never had a haircut. I am Indian, and I respect his decision of following his culture because I know that reason. But last week my white friend John was joking and asked Arshpreet to get a haircut. I took that defensively and asked me why is Arshpreet's beard and religious culture affecting him that he is suggesting him to have a haircut. I was mad at him, but after some time we argued and he apologized and told me he was joking. We are still good friends but it is my habit to take everything defensively. Out of Gibb's six defensive categories I think my personal example follows control/problem oriented, neutrality/empathy, and certainty/provisionalism. It is because I talked on behalf of my friend, supported him and allowed John to practice his beliefs and not to say anything about others cultural or religious values.

Confirming Disagreement

This chapter is a great about relating personal life to the others view. I feel uncomfortable while confirming with my friends about my disagreement to their viewpoints. I do not want to hurt them by saying that I disagree with their views. Instead of confirming I would either argue with my friends or tell them why I disagree. But after reading chapter eight I learnt that I should rather first respect their point of view (recognition), confirm with them my disagreement (acknowledgement) and then I should argue about it (endorsement). The difference between confirmation and endorsement is that in confirmation we confirm others that we understand their views and respect their ideas, but endorsement means it is a formal approval that we agree with the ideas. We might not confirm our disagreement in endorsement but we just approve the other persons ideas. On the other hand in confirmation we not only confirm but endorse also, or in other words we validate the others idea.

Relationship is about Trust

Most of us have been in relationships, some still are, some are planning, some are thinking, and some have issues in their relationship. The most satisfactory part in a personal relationship is trust. I agree with the author that it involves believing in your partner's reliability. The meaning of reliability is that he or she will do everything as promised. Also, the most important part that was pointed out by the author was that trust does not just come automatically in relationships, because it is earned over time. We talk with our partner about our everyday life, in other words we share our feelings because we want to trust that person. We expect them to be caring about our feelings and as a result we share feelings with them. I personally can say that trust is the basic foundation for a relationship, without trust nor can a relationship work neither it is a good idea to try working it out. Because if we cannot trust a person then there is no point of a relationship as we cannot share anything between each other, cannot keep promises, and most importantly cannot share truth. Therefore, it is my advice to my friends and my blog reader to never even bother to try a relationship with someone whom you cannot trust.

Fallacies in my Communication

I thought my communication skills were very good, until I read this week's reading and came across the fallacies. In my intrapersonal communication, I do a lot of those fallacies but the one that is most common in my communication is my response to other people when they communicate emotions with me. For example, about a week ago in my philosophy class midterm my friend was telling me that he could not study because of his family party at his house. I was reviewing for midterm when he told me his problem but rather than consoling him, I told him. "it is okay, you will do fine". I thought I did not say anything wrong to him, but he took it offensively. He thought I did not care about his life or his feelings, but on the other hand I was focused on my review for midterm and just randomly answered him. I felt bad and apologize to him, and today after reading this chapter I realized that I should response sensitively to others, when they communicate with me through their emotions.

Choose whether and how to express?

Emotions are a way of representing ourselves to others around us. A person can immediately understand the feeling of a person through emotions. For example, when we see a person crying we can immediately understand that the person that is crying is hurt or is in pain. He or she can be sad about earning a bad score in their mid-term, but our reaction is that we are able to understand their feelings. Also, emotions can sometimes back fire also. Like in the instance of recent scandal in San Diego County, a married chief sheriff was caught dating another lower level officer. That lower level officer did not knew that chief sheriff was married, but one day she saw chief with his wife and talked to chief in an arrogant way. She expressed her emotions, but by uploading her and chief supervisors picture on face-book. Although, that officer got the picture at the time they were dating but the emotion of betrayal lead the lower level positioned officer to petition against chief justice. Overall, I would say that emotions are very strong feelings in today's life and they are used for expressing the feelings.

Emotions

After reading, I had one question in my mind, do emotions control our body and mind or is it the mind that controls our body and the emotions? Science tells us that our body is controlled by the nervous system in our brain but what about our emotions. Who controls our emotions when we are happy or when we cry? Emotion by Webster dictionary is defined as a state of excitement, a feeling, and a conscious mental reaction directed toward a specific object and accompanied by physiological behavior. When I am in the examination hall and ready to take my exam most of the time my hands will be shaking and I will be sweating. I know I am ready but still I sweat, that is not controlled by my brain. I personally think the emotions are involuntary act that are not controlled by our brain. Rather, they are controlled by the emotions we going through according the place where we at.