Over the past week and a half we have covered emotional and conversational messages, interpersonal, personal and professional relationships. I’ve found the information from these chapters the most useful and interesting thus far in the semester. This is because the previous chapters have shown us the basic building blocks of conversations, while these five chapters have delved into the dynamics of applying conversation techniques within certain situations and relationships. I think its interesting that we can flip a switch, if you will, to change how we act around specific people or groups. You can be laughing with you friends one minute, having a very lax conversation and then a professor approaches causing you to switch gears. You might become more reserved, stand up straighter, give them your undivided attention, give a firm handshake, be sure of your responses. What I am saying is that these relationship chapters really brought to my attention the underlying rules within relationships and how we conform from our relaxed or natural personality to fit those requirements. The emotion chapter made me more aware of when I am covering up certain emotions and why I am doing that.
This also ties into the presentation via skype by Jimmy’s brother. At the beginning he asked us to each compile a list of emotions we were and were not comfortable with. My comfortable list had happiness and emotions that went with that general theme but I also included sadness. It seemed like most other people put sadness on the uncomfortable list which I found interesting. I approached the uncomfortable list as things that really unnerve me, feelings that go along with tough times, or emotions I am scared of because of the actions or situations that lead to it; emotions like anger and dread. Sadness, for me, is a very broad emotion. On one side of the spectrum you can be distraught over a friends death, on the other side you can be sad because you could not go on that awesome vacation to Disney. I think we feel varying degrees of sadness throughout a week, and because sadness is not always in the extreme I am comfortable performing that emotion. I was glad that he could give us some real life scenarios to go along with the three different types of emotions; instrumental, secondary, and primary. Also that he emphasized the importance of expressing primary emotions, especially in relationships because you might fall into argument with your partner where you are both reacting to secondary emotions or assumptions and are therefore not addressing the real problem.
I found a silly short video to go along with this:
We had two exercises this past week and a half, one that I enjoyed tremendously more than the other. The activity I thought was more successful was when we went up in pairs to act out a unsatisfying conversational partner and the class had to guess with label their actions went with. I thought this was extremely beneficial, reading in a textbook does not always allow us to fully grasp the concept. Through this activity each conversational partner’s flaws were clear and I am sure we all thought at some point or another that we had been stuck in a conversation like that.
The other activity, splitting the class in two, trying to construct a paper towel higher than the other groups, and evaluating the situation by wearing a “thinking hat” that was assigned to us seemed like it would be fun. From what I saw it was really fun for the other group but we were thinking about the hats too much which I think stumped a few people, including myself in my group. I had difficulty trying to figure out how to evaluate what we were doing through feelings. I tried to play off people’s feelings, paying special attention to the people wearing the positive benefit and devils advocate hats but I felt like in this situation it was hard to come up with something to say other than how do you feel about that? I can see the benefits of the feeling hat in conversations with friends, someone could be complaining about a roommate do picking up after herself, you would focus on your friends frustration and come up with a way to present the problem to the other roommate without starting an argument. I just found the role I had to play was very challenging. My idea was simple, fold the paper in half and stand it up. Michelle and the girl who sits in the front corner had more creative ideas, and the group would come up with a reason why it would not work or we would just try it out. When we were at the front table in the end I really liked the atmosphere up there, the rivalry aspect of it, we all wanted to win.
Now during the analysis of the activity one girl really upset our whole group. She said that she was the only one doing anything, that she finally decided to just do it by herself, and said that the group was just sitting there. I felt like that was extremely rude to make these accusations in front of the whole class. I feel like she did not think about what she was saying. To me it seemed like she had a problem with the “hat,” the new idea hat. I feel like the person wearing that hat would default to group leader in this scenario because we needed some creative ideas. It seemed like she was not comfortable with that role and she took it out on everyone else, literally said we did nothing, which caused a lot of us to walk out of class in a foul mood.
This is a really great post.
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