4/5-week 4

In week four of her nine-week series on interpersonal communication with her sisters, Wispy discusses six guidelines for effective verbal communication. These guidelines include existentialize, see the individual, distinguish between facts and inferences, discriminate among, talk about the middle, and update messages. Wispy shares personal experiences with her sisters, particularly in relation to distinguishing between fact and inferences, avoiding polarization, and updating messages. She concludes that it is important to consider these guidelines in order to improve communication and understanding within sibling relationships. Hi, this is Wispy, and this is week four of my nine weeks of looking at my relationship between myself and my four sisters through the lens of interpersonal communication. The subject for this week is going to be verbal communication, specifically guidelines for using verbal messages effectively. In Interpersonal Communication book by Joseph DeVito, he goes into six specific guidelines for using verbal messages effectively. The first is existentialize, the second, to see the individual, the third, distinguishing between facts and inferences, fourth, discriminate, four, discriminate among, five, talk about the middle, six, update messages. So the first guideline, being existentialize, has two aspects to it. The first term is intentional orientation, and the second is extensional orientation. And one of these is what you want to be doing when communicating, and the other is one you want to avoid. So the first, intentional orientation, is the one that you want to avoid. It's the tendency to view people, objects, or events in terms of how they've been labeled and not actually what is true of them, versus existential orientation, which is the opposite. It is looking at people as what they actually are and not just what they've been labeled as. The second is see the individual and avoid allness. So what allness is, is the habit of grouping people together, judging a whole based off of one part of it, whether that be one person or one experience, it's basically just the idea of judging a whole off of one. Third is distinguish between fact and inferences, and avoid fact-inference confusion. Inferences is basically assumptions, and facts is facts. So an example of inferences would be inferring that them wearing a certain color shirt that you don't like means that they don't like you. Maybe the fact is that they just wore the shirt because they like the shirt, but you infer it that it means they don't like you. And so fact-inference confusion is when you take that inference as truth. So because they're wearing this shirt, therefore they don't like you, and that is the truth, even though it's not. And then the fourth is discriminate among and to avoid indiscrimination. This one is just encouraging people to avoid stereotyping others and filing people into groupings, but rather to focus on individuals and the differences between them. The fifth is talk about the middle or avoid polarization. Polarization is judging things off of extremes. It's basically just looking at the world through extremes of either good or bad, very black or white, and never giving room for things to be a little bit more gray or a little bit of a mix of good and bad. They can only either be good or bad when having a polarization mindset. The sixth and final guideline is update messages or avoid static evolution. And static evolution is just when one is closed off to the idea that people grow and change, and you just continue to view them as the way that you initially saw them. When reading the six of these guidelines, there were three of them that really stuck out to me and reminded me a lot of my experience and my relationship with my siblings. The first of the six was the third one, being distinguishing between fact and inferences. And this I found really interesting because it is a constant problem that happens in my relationship with my siblings, where we all are really close and we tend to communicate pretty well, I would say. But there are definitely times where there can be some miscommunication, and let's say I'm really tired one day and my older sister Katie comes over and she has a lot of energy and she's talking about something and I just cannot keep up at all, like I'm barely there mentally, I'm just so tired. And she could take that as me being rude and standoffish and not caring about what she has to say, when in actuality I do, but I'm just tired. And instances like that happen all the time between myself and my four sisters, because since there's so many of us and we're so different, we're always constantly in different places emotionally or mentally speaking, and that accounts for most of our mistaking inferences to be facts, because it's so easy for us to jump to conclusions that aren't necessarily right or fair. And Oxford University Press provides a good quote for this, they say, Fact inference confusion may occur when inferential statements or conclusions arrived at from interpretations of events. Arguments often arise when we label our inferentials as facts. And I found that to be true with my siblings because it wasn't just that we were inferring things that weren't necessarily there, it's that we were inferring things to be truth. It was when we took our thoughts to be facts is when the arguments arose and that miscommunication kind of got in between us. The second guideline that stuck out to me and reminded me of my siblings was the fifth one which talks about polarization. This reminded me of them because all of us in our own moments will jump to negative or positive extremes about the other sibling. And when looking into this, I found a quote from ADR Times which said, The best way to avoid and address polarization is to humanize the other side because it's more difficult to harm a friend or a nice person than it is to harm an enemy. When we begin to eliminate our extreme differences, we often find that there is more that we have in common than we thought. And this made me think of my siblings because that's usually how it tends to go with us is whenever there's negative or positive extreme that's being claimed to be true of another sibling, every single time we resolve that conflict, it's because we learn to look at things from the other person's point of view and humanizing them rather than trying to demonize them and make them seem like this extreme awful thing. The third and final of the six guidelines which reminded me of my sisters was the sixth one which is about updating messages and avoiding static evolution. Out of all six of the guidelines, this one reminded me the most of them because when you grow up with a bunch of girls, it's easy for you to view them as the persons that they used to be and usually I think of the way that my siblings were when they were all in high school. I don't know why but all of them, whether they're older than me or younger than me, I always viewed them the way that they were in high school and they're not, all of them aren't that person that they used to be anymore. All of us have changed in our own ways and just grown up and it's so easy for me to view my siblings in that old light of them and not the persons that they are now and so I just thought that was really interesting and something that I can definitely think about when looking at my relationship with my sisters is viewing them as the people that they've grown into and not the people that they used to be. So in conclusion, I think the three biggest takeaways that I got from this week's reading were the three guidelines that I mentioned, being distinguishing between fact and inferences, talking about the middle, and updating messages and with distinguishing fact and inferences, I just learned to not take, if I take offense to something that a sibling does or says to me, to take a step back and to look at the facts and not so much what I feel to be true and with talking about the middle, I learned whether it's my sisters or me talking about somebody negatively, just learning to look at things from that other person's perspective and trying to humanize them more rather than demonize them and lastly, the updating messages, that just reminded me to look at my siblings as evolving and not just stagnant in the way that I saw them at whatever given point in time. That's all I have for this week, but if you have any questions or comments or anything like that, you can leave it in the chat box and I'll be back next week. Thanks for listening.