Three Communication Principles

Choose three of the communication principles stated in the text. Use personal experiences to explain why you agree or disagree with them.

One of the principles of communication is that “emotions drive our major decisions. To me this means that although we one tries to be objective and to make the most logical decision, there will always be a level of personal feeling and emotion underlying the decision made. One personal experience of mine that can prove this to be correct was during my two years of work at McDonalds. I was an assistant manager and I was left to run the shift by myself because my manager called out sick for the day. During the shift an employee who happened to also be a close friend of mine decided on his lunch break to smoke marijuana. When he came back from his break he stank of marijuana and was noticeably “high”. As if the situation were not already bad, I also got complaints from a customer and some of his co-workers. Knowing what needed to be done, I found myself putting it off. I stayed in the office and struggled with finding the least hurtful way to tell him that he had been let go. The right thing to do is often times overshadowed by human natures longing to be a good friend, someone that friend’s can always count on to be there and on their side. However, in a work environment friendship and loyalty must take a backseat to rules and regulation.

The second principle of communication is that “passion defeats intellect”. For example when electing a president, voters more often than not will lean toward the candidate who firmly and visibly believes in his campaign mottos and slogans. In my personal experience I wasn’t always aware of this principle. When I was in junior high school I ran for class vice president. My campaign strategy was to focus on letting my voters know just how much I knew, and pumped there heads with everything I thought they wanted to hear. However my opponent took a different root. Instead they decided to touch the voters on a personal level, expressing how they related to them as a fellow student. Needless to say my opponent won the election with their personality and passion to help their fellow students.

The third communication principle states “What we see defeats what we see”.

Compare and contrast what happens in your I-You relationships with what happens in your I-Thou relationships.

The textbook discusses the difference between I-thou relationships and I-you relationships. In an I-thou relationship the relationship becomes fully human, we reveal who we truly are and we take off the mask that we present to the entire world. There are few who we let get inside our true selves and those that do have most likely earned their right to be there. Examples of an I-thou relationship would be ones relationship with their mother, boyfriend/girl friend, and best friend. When dealing with a boy friend/girl friend, we tend to expose all of our emotions. Ideally with them we hide nothing and encourage them to do the same.

An I-you relationship is the most common type of relationship, we tend to have more of these than I-thou relationship. In these relationships we are more preoccupied with our self image, instead of building of a genuine meaningful relationship we worry ourselves with the way we are perceived by the other person. We wear a mask to boost ourselves to the level that we think that they see us.

Write out the textbook definition of interpersonal communication. Using a personal example, explain the various parts of the definition.

Interpersonal communication is termed as spoken communication that takes place between two or more individuals, on a face to face level. The process includes a sender and a receiver/receivers, and between the two or three there is a message being transmitted. The sender encodes the message, using words that best describe the message using special intonation to emphasize parts. The sender’s job is also to structure the message so that it is easily understood. Then the message is transmitted along what is called the channel. A channel of communication ca is a telephone, a fax, or an email. Once the receiver receives the message, they begin to decode it, trying to make sense of the message. When decoding the message, the receiver uses previous experiences, emotions, ideas, and beliefs to decode the message. An experience of my own that