Reflection Essay on the Course Interpersonal Relationship

This essay’s goal is to give my critical reflection on the course Interpersonal Relationship. This course aims at facilitating students to develop a positive relationship with others through active sharing and participation in class discussions and group projects. Major topics covered in this course were about understanding self, important elements interpersonal relationship and basic interpersonal relationship communication skills, etc. Throughout the reflection paper, I will be discussing the theories and concepts I learnt, my feelings about the course and to evaluate how my feelings changed and developed during it. The reason I took this course is because I want to polish my interpersonal relationship skills and to open oneself to listen to others and to resist the urge to respond to others quickly.  

Communication & Understanding Self

The subtopics included are communication, self concept and the Carl Roger concept of self. The definition of communication is to use messages to generate meanings. Through communication, It will fulfil physicals needs, identity needs, social needs and practical needs. There are different principal of communications — it can be intentional or unintentional, irreversible and unrepeatable. However, there is no single or effective way to communicate since communication is situational and can be learned. Communication competence includes some characteristics such as involvement, self monitoring and empathy. To improve communication competence, it had to be started with understanding self concept. Self concept is a relatively stable set of perception people have of themselves and  it exists in both consciousness and unconsciousness e.g. how we think about and evaluate oneself. Temporal self appraisal theory is a theory that perceives the past self less favourably and the future self more positively and people have a tendency to maintain a positive evaluation of the current self by distancing negative selves and bringing closer positive selves. Lastly, Carl Rogers believes the self concept has 3 different components — self image, self esteem and ideal self. Self image is the view a person have on oneself e.g. a person with anorexia who is thin may have a self image in which they believe they’re fat. Self esteem is how much value that is placed by a person on oneself e.g. people who feel good about themselves have positive expectations about how they will communicate, and in turn  increase the chance of successful communication. These successes contributes to positive evaluation which reinforced self esteem. There are ways to measure self esteem for example, Harril Self Esteem Inventory — a questionnaire consisting of 15 questions about a range of interest and thematic apperception test — a neutral cartoon given to the participant who then has to devise a story about what’s going on. The third concept is ideal self which csn be congruent and incongruent. In congruent ideal self, the self image is similar to ideal self whereas in incongruent ideal self, the self image is different to ideal self, etc.

The content that was thought in classes was extremely useful to both in improving the relationship between me and people and it also helped me to familiarise me with myself and to identify the type of person I am in a interpersonal communication. My observation is that this course made me pay more attention to people instead of speaking my thoughts only. Besides, it also made me familiarise with myself more and helped me understand myself more and learnt how to approach people without coming off as aggressive. The concept that I found the most interesting is self esteem since I’m a person who’s an introvert and have low self esteem, hence being not able to step out of my circle. Learning about this helps me to identify ways that could help me be more engaging in communications which would help me open up to different people and to increase my confidence level. Other than that, It would also help me overcome the fear of public speaking since I always get nervous if I have to express my feelings or give a presentation in front of a lot of people. Overall, this subject helped me a lot in terms of both personal and interpersonal level since it helped me confide in myself to encourage myself to communicate with people more and to not feel scared about wanting to know other people more and to be more proactive in asking questions during class or any other situation when I have to.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I identified my strengths and weaknesses and developed some ideas on how to improve my communication skills to become a more knowledgeable and skilled communicator. I plan to be an effective and ethical communicator by further educating myself in this area and practicing verbal, nonverbal, and active listening skills that I learned in the Interpersonal Relationship course.