The Importance Of Interpersonal Communication To Succes In Todays Society

Try picturing a society where we all communicate the same way. Your freedom to express how you feel would be nonexistent. As humans, we need the ability to communicate in our own way. Our culture is passed on from one generation to the next through communication. Our acculturation shapes us into whom we are, forming our ethnic identity. Demographic changes have shaped the United States into a widely diverse melting pot. Who we are and who are becoming is a lifelong process that will change multiple times during the different stages of our life, every time a relationship changes, a life event changes, our identity changes. Success in life relies on the abilities to communicate effectively, and our self-perception correlates with how we respond. Understanding how people communicate with one another is one of the basic needs we spend our lives trying to fulfill. Joseph Devito states, “Interpersonal Communication is the verbal and nonverbal interactions between two (or sometimes more than two) interdependent people”. We as people communicate every day and almost everywhere worldwide. Being able to communicate in an educated manor places you higher above someone who cannot. The way we communicate directly influences our relationships with others. “It is part of the skill set employers expect potential employees to have”.

In our first journal essay and discussed further, in class we covered how interpersonal communication has changed drastically over the years and will continue to change as we as people continue to change. One of my fellow peers told the class that you can not approach every interaction the same, we must adjust to our audiences. For example, when speaking to my mother it is in a very dyadic relationship but when speaking to a potential employer it is in a professional form. Communication provides many ways to grow personally in life. Communicating allows us to learn, to relate to others, to influence, to play, and to help others. How we view ourselves correlates with how we communicate in life with others. Our image of who we are is our personal self-concept. Our self-concept is the feelings, thoughts, strengths, weaknesses, and aspirations we desire. There are four things that make up our self-concept. These includes others’ images, social comparisons, cultural teachings, and self-evaluations. Other’s images are the “looking-glass self”. It’s the image of you that others have created that they show to you. The social comparisons are relations you make between you and the people you communicate with. Cultural teachings are the beliefs and lessons that you have learned and come to believe in and self-evaluations are the way you interpret and process your thoughts and behaviors. Understanding self-concept helps to figure out why people act a certain way or believe in a certain cause. Knowing how your self-concept is formed increases your self-awareness. Devito states, “Self-awareness represents the extent to which you know yourself”. The more in-depth you are with yourself the further you will discover who you truly are. This can be described through the Johari model of the self.

We as people have four selves that we develop in through life. Each self-relies on the other, and no ones four selves are the same. The first self is your “open self”, it contains all the personal information about you. This includes behaviors, attitudes, motivations, and desires. To break it down further it also contains a name, skin color, age, and religious beliefs. “The blind-self represents all the things about you that others know but of which you’re ignorant”. This is the second self. An example of this is having flushed cheeks when you're embarrassed, or your body scent. Your third self-contains all the things you keep secret and do not share with others. As we go through life one of our selves can grow bigger than the others when needed. Growing and developing our self-awareness further allows us to communicate effectively. We can expand our self-awareness by finding asking questions pertaining to you. Listen better to others and opening your “open self. ” Self-esteem often in life can be the line between success and failure. It affects confidence and can cause a negative self-concept. “Self-esteem is a measure of how valuable you think you are”. If you have a high self-esteem you have a positive self-concept and its opposite, low self-esteem equals low self-concept. This has a negative effect on your emotions and behavior. To be successful in society today people look for someone who exhibits high self-esteem and confident behavior traits. In theory when you are happy with yourself your happy with your life. This method of thinking explains why people tend to believe the phrase, “good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people”.

Every culture has its reason for the way they think and process information about themselves. Developing these teachings improves communication with one another so we can relate friend from foe. When communicating one of the factors that help dictates how we respond is perception. How we are alerted of our surroundings and receive information from our senses is perception. The five senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound react with our personal experiences from life to guide our communication. Interpersonal perception has five stages to it, using these stages we can process how to react to certain situations. It is important to know that every communication situation is unique, and you cannot approach all interactions the same. What is appropriate one time, maybe inappropriate another time? The first stage of perception is stimulation thus meaning the senses have been triggered. Within stimulation are selective attention and selective exposure. Selective attention states, “you attend to those things that you anticipate will fulfill your needs or will prove enjoyable” and selective exposure states, “you expose yourself to people or messages that confirm your existing beliefs, contribute to your objectives, or prove satisfying in some way”. Stage two the organization, this is where you put together all the information that your senses picked up and organize them by scripts and schemata. Stage three is interpretation-evaluation. In this stage, you take life experiences, beliefs, and expectations and use them to evaluate your way of thinking. For example, meeting a music teacher you would conclude that they can read sheet music, or conduct a band. By taking perception and interpretation and applying life’s experiences you get memory which is stage four.

The final stage is recall. To recall we take the information from the memories that we store through life. Without these crucial stages, we could not communicate or understand one another effectively. For generations, we have passed down our culture through the art of speech. Communication is an easy way we have learned to spread knowledge and pass down our life lessons. It is a way of comfort and a way to spread joy.

Communication is the basic way to form a relationship via coworker, neighbor, etc. Our freedom of speech is the right we will use daily it allows us to communicate and discover our self-perception of this world. Verbal or not it is a basic human need and one that will continue to shape our lives as we grow.