Free Essay on Interpersonal Communication Dynamics and Its Elements

Communication is the primary language that enables people to pass messages across. Thou gender, cultural backgrounds, and social interactions tend to influence it in one way or the other. From different communication styles ranging from verbal messages to nonverbal cues, we get to find out peoples characters and orientations. People get to develop directions, open up more easily before their counterparts. Competent communicators continue enhancing their skills by growing their knowledge of interactions.

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Effective communication is essential in many ways in daily activities. It can elevate ones health as well as emotional well-being apart from satisfying normal practical needs. In one way or the other communication helps in the creation of individual identities and satisfaction of our social needs. The theory of Hierarchy of Needs as suggested by Psychologist Abraham Maslow states that identity, social, physical and practical needs fall into hierarchical categories that follow a chronological order of satisfaction ranging from the most fundamental needs. Communication is defined as a transactional process that involves participants to create a relationship when encoding and decoding messages simultaneously, always affected by the noise of different natures. Interpersonal communication varies from qualitative to quantitative views, which is the type of interaction and number of people respectively.

Communication is guided by several principles, and messages can be put across intentionally or unintentionally, thus making communication irreversible and unrepeatable. Relational and content dimensions have been found in messages, putting in mind meanings are found in people rather than in words. Competent communicators have mastered the ability to get information from others in a way that does not distort their relationship. This ability is essential in intercultural communication, in involves ambiguity tolerance, being open-minded as well having effective communication skills. Social media communication involves the use of different unique skills to maintain online and normal face to face relationships.

Self concept is a form of impersonal communication that explains how individuals perceive themselves. Inherited personality traits tend to influence the characteristics of self. Many a time the self concept in made alive through information and messages got from people seen significant in ones life, ranging from appraisals to social influences with different groups. This indicates the subjective nature of this concept from gender to background cultures. People get affected both positively and negatively by the self-fulfilling prophecy when one's expectation influence the outcome of a given event foretold. Willingness to change positively one's self-concept leads to effective communication, and this process requires new set skills and information.

Strategic communication is used to manage individual identity by changing others' views and opinions about the person. Identity management aims at achieving different content and relational goals as well as follow the set conventions and social rules. Many a time's people use this concept to boost their self-esteem before others. Others also use this to show their background especially the individualist and communal natured people. The universe has a lot to offer people beyond what one individual can comprehend. It takes different steps by people to get to understand the environment they could currently be.

The main spelled out a process of making sense of the surrounding is stimuli selection, the organization of the selected information into meaningful patterns than their interpretation following different factors and finally, we negotiate this gathered information through discussions we share with other people. Factors affecting our interpretation of information vary from physiological, cultural background as well as how we interact tend to give meaning to the behavior of people. During communication, we tend to have perceptual tendencies that in more ways lead us to attribution errors. For example, we tend to charitably judge ourselves more than others. We also cling onto our first impressions of people which in some instances may be the wrong interpretation. Most times l have found myself having the halo effect on people by forming an overall positive impression of them after only observing a single active character.

Another assumption is we tend to view ourselves similar to others and also be influenced by obvious stimuli. Before making a final judgment about other's behavior, the perception has to be used to verify interpretations. This involves first of all description of a person's behavior, followed by giving a chance for two possible explanations with meanings and finally inquiring more from the person about the real meaning of behavior in question. Empathy is used in is used in interpretation to to get the other person's point of view by putting oneself in the situation. Cognitive complexity allows one to create different forms of understanding an issue. This in many ways improves our way of communication in different contexts. Embracing both empathy and cognitive complexity allows one to have a variety of ways to tackle an issue, the merging of this two techniques gives one a higher chance to interpret situations amicably thus referred to the pillow method.

Language is a great communication tool but also the cause of most interpersonal problems when used carelessly. It is governed by rules that are semantic, pragmatic and syntactic, as earlier mentioned meanings rest in people but not words were spoken. Language is the pinnacle of what people perceive others, and it is used for reflection of affiliation of a person towards others. When using language, a competent communicator embraces precision by assessing the situation by using emotive terms and not confusing facts with opinions and personal perspectives which most times result in disharmony in interpersonal relationships. Effective communication calls for the proper use of "I" and "We" language when reaching significant levels of relational unity. The relationship between language and gender brings about the variation in communication styles as well as the flow of conversations and content; nevertheless, occupation, social philosophy, gender roles as well as orientation play a significant role towards solving issues and are influential towards language use of people.

Cultures use different languages to reflect views, for example, low-context cultures embrace language majorly to show feelings and ideas directly on the other hand high-context cultures do not embrace much of direct language use to preserve social unity. Despite all the differences in cultures in language, the main aim is support of linguistic relativism explaining that language is the primary influence of the peoples worldview especially those who speak the particular language.

Communication cannot be complete without nonverbal cues, which are nonlinguistic regarding expression. Nonverbal communication is seen through the use of body movements, voice, personal appearance, physical touch, space, and time. Effective communication calls for the mastery of nonverbal skills. Nonverbal communication varies depending on cultures and gender. It tends to reveal attitudes and personal feels towards what is being said or speaker, unlike the verbal communication. Nonverbal cues serve for repetition, complementation, accenting, substitution for as well as regulation of verbal communication. These cues can be relied on during the conflict of verbal and nonverbal messages being put across. The interpretation of these cues has to be carefully analyzed to prevent misinterpretation because most of the nonverbal communication often is ambiguous in many ways.

When interacting with fellow peers, I tend to look out for their nonverbal cues to find out more about their views about the topic under discussion. The communication process is not complete without the listening element, which is most often overlooked. This is making sense out of what the speaker is trying to put across through spoken words. Most people confuse listening to hearing, and its categorized into mindless and mindful listening. According to Adler, listening consists of five elements that follow each other from hearing, attending, understanding, responding and finally remembering. Poor listening habits are often elevated by some common reasons, which include receiving a lot of messages at the same time leaving us confused, being preoccupied with personal issues, outside noise, the effort involved in effective listening makes people not really focused.

Some people believe it's more rewarding to speak than listen thus keep looking down and disrupting the speaker as they view their points more important on the other hand some listeners tend to have a hearing impairment. Some ways have been outlined by Adler to evaluate whether people are paying close attention to the speaker, some of the listening responses focus more on information gathering and support provision, these include prompting, asking questions for clarity, paraphrasing and offering support. Effective communication involves embracing all the styles of careful listening while considering external factors such as gender.

People get into interpersonal relationships for different reasons. Most of us fall into the category of being attracted by, one, the physical appearance of the other, second similar perception about life, third how one complements the other. Some of the people get attracted to others due to self-disclosure especially about personal information, and competence works for others. The closer one is the most attracted others are last but not least reward. The dynamics of interpersonal relationships have been interpreted through different perspectives in models. The first model explains how communication illuminates the characters of people involved as they first meet and come together and through the stages drawn apart. On the other hand, the dialectical model explains that people are motivated in a relationship by the desire to fulfill different needs that are mutual but incompatible.

Metacommunication goes a long way to avoid issues in any given interpersonal relationship, as communicators discuss and put across messages regarding the relationship thus solving problems without blowing them out of proportion. This varies concerning content and relational. Relational embraces the use of both verbal and nonverbal communication. It also embraces different dimensions these include, respect, immediacy, affinity, and control in the relationship. In interpersonal relationships intimacy is paramount, and it's shown through different dimensions that range from physical that is touch, intellectual which is knowledge, emotional that is feels, and finally, activities shared in unison.

Different cultures and genders have a unique way of expressing intimacy, thus, also affect it. Face to face and mediated communication aid in the occurrence of intimacy, but the main communicators make the final decision concerning where and when to be intimate. No one chooses their families; thus, the relationships are formative in nature, involuntary, and everyone has the role to play thus they operate in systems through the development of communication patterns. Friendships go a long way especially with the aid of effective communication. This communication is varied inn nature ranging from age, history of relationship as well as how normal people interact, obligation, self-disclosure and the gender of friends. Communication plays great role couple relationships especially in conflict resolution that range from volatile, avoidant and validating.

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