4/5-week 1

Lucy discusses her nine-week journey exploring her relationship with her sisters and how it has changed over the years through interpersonal communication. She explains the transactional model of communication, which involves the simultaneous sending and receiving of messages between two people. Lucy shares her experiences with her younger sister, highlighting how they have become attuned to each other's thoughts and feelings without explicitly communicating. She then introduces the concept of long-term orientation, contrasting it with short-term orientation, which emphasizes instant gratification. Lucy reflects on how her relationship with her siblings has shifted from being short-term and individualistic to long-term and collectivist as they have grown older. She emphasizes the importance of putting effort into maintaining relationships and adapting to changes in the environment. Lucy concludes that while a long-term orientation may not be necessary for a relationship to begin, it is Hi, I'm Lucy, and this is my nine-week journey through looking at my relationship between my four sisters, myself, and how it's changed through the years through the lens of interpersonal communication. And on this episode, I'm going to be focusing mainly on the subject of long-term orientation. So before I jump into everything about long-term orientation, I felt as though a good place to begin would be just to explain what interpersonal communication is. So in the book, A Pastor's Guide to Interpersonal Communication by Blake Ness, he writes that communication theorists often explain the process of interpersonal communication by means of the transactional model of communication. So what is the transactional model of communication? In his book, Blake Ness describes it as a conversation between two people, and a good way to think of it is that both of them are both acting as the sender and the receiver in this interaction. So in this model, there are two people both acting as sender and receiver, a message that's being sent back and forth through a channel, which is just how the message is being communicated. And surrounding them is noise, which a good way to think of it is just the environment that you're in. So it could be whether it's light or dark outside, whether it's loud or quiet, private or public, that's the noise. And the main idea of the model is just that they're simultaneous sending and receiving of messages that's continuously happening. The first thing that came to my mind when reading about this was my relationship with my younger sister. Me and my little sister Caroline are a lot alike in many ways, and so much of that is from us learning from one another just by being around one another. The first thing that came to my mind when reading about this was my relationship with my younger sister. Me and my little sister Caroline are a lot alike in many ways, and so much of that is from us learning from one another just by being around one another. We've both become attuned to each other's humor and the clothes we like, the music we like, the way we talk. We share so many of those things just from being around one another, even down to the way that we think. We think so much alike at this point that I don't even have to ask her what she's feeling or thinking in order to know because I already know. I can just tell by the look on her face. That is a good example of interpersonal communication and of that transactional model of communication because it's the idea that I am receiving the message that she is sending without her even purposefully sending it. Now there's room for debate on this subject because some people believe that you can't communicate without intentionality, so if Caroline isn't purposefully trying to communicate something for me, then it's not true communication. She might be purposely sending it in a way because maybe she's not saying anything, but the look on her face she knows will convey a certain message to me, but regardless, it's the idea that there's constant communication happening between the two of us. There's a constant sending and receiving of messages. So now that you probably have a proper understanding or a general grasp at least of what interpersonal communication is, we can get into the main idea, the main subject of today's episode, which is long-term orientation. I felt that it was necessary when talking about long-term orientation to also explain short-term orientation. So in Simply Psychology, Charlotte Nickerson writes that short-term orientation in a society indicates a focus on the near future and involves delivering short-term success or gratification and places a stronger emphasis on the present rather than the future. So as you can get from that quote, short-term orientation, the main idea of it is that there's a desire for instant gratification, so that's the focus of the culture. And I realized when I was reading that that my relationship with my siblings was very short-term oriented when we were younger because we were all very focused on our own instant gratification at that point because we really had no concept, I guess, of the idea of not living with one another and having to think about the other person's time and schedule so that we could see each other. We were so used to constantly being with each other that we really took it for granted and with that we had more space to think about ourselves and our own wants and needs. So also with that, I realized that we were very individualistic in our culture at that time and in an interpersonal communication book by Joseph DeVito, he describes individualistic cultures as being very focused and responsible for themselves, whereas collective cultures are more responsible for the entire group. And when I was younger we were very short-term oriented as well as very individualistically mindset but as we got older we shifted into being more long-term and collectivist of a culture. And to explain what long-term orientation is, in Simply Psychology it says that long-term orientation encourages delaying gratification or the material and social and emotional needs of the members and this usually results in strong tradition and the ability to adapt. So I realized that while when we were younger we were more focused on our instant gratification at that time, as we got older we learned to realize that it mattered to put aside our instant gratification in order to maintain relationship. And that resulted in the ability to adapt which is one of the effects of long-term orientation. Examples of this in my relationship with my sisters was we began to put effort into having coffee dates with one another and seeing my older sister and her baby and helping take care of him and baking and cooking with one another, things like that that weren't necessarily maybe what we wanted to do in those moments but we knew would be worth it because it helps maintain that relationship. Because now that there was a shift from when we were younger and we lived together to now when we're older and we don't live together, there was a change in that environment, there also had to be a change in the way that we functioned with one another, the way that our culture was between one another, where before since we lived together we didn't have to think so much long-term because reality was that we were constantly together. But now we did have to, we had to plan out when we were going to see each other and how we were going to maintain that relationship. So in conclusion, having a culture of long-term orientation isn't necessarily the culture that a relationship needs to begin with in order to flourish, but I believe that if a relationship is going to continue in a healthy way, that there has to be a shift towards that at some point or another down the line. So that's all I've got for today, but thank you so much for listening and I'll be back next week. Bye!