Descriptive Reflection - Strengths and challenges in communicating
Communication is probably the most important tool in managing inter-personal relationships, My strength in communication is empathy. I am always able to relate to others when I hear from others. By putting myself in other peoples' shoes, I am able to feel what they feel and share other people's problems, giving others critical opinions in a way that will not hurt them. With this strength, I am able to get along well with a lot of people and gain trust from others very fast.
However, I have my own troubles. Firstly, as a non-native English speaker, I am not very confident to communicate in English and I always stumble myself when I speak publicly, even though I had tried my best. However, I can perform well on a stage with thousands of audiences but I can hardly speak fluently and naturally in front of a 20 students class. However, I am able to present well with my native language, so this problem is because I am unfamiliar with English, if I continue to practice English, I should be able to solve this problem.
Secondly, during Teng Teng's second lesson, I gained a lot of new knowledge and the sentence "Selection affects us" shocked me, as I realised that I am also always affected by my own perception and not being objective. This is very bad because it prevents me from being fair to all. With a coloured-glass, I might appear mean sometimes. For example, I had a terrible conflict with one of my classmate before (whom cannot be named), and since then my opinion of him have always been negative and refuse to talk to him. Whenever he did badly I will blame this with his internal attribution and when he did well, I will think it as an external attribution.
As I am enrolled in COM150 course, I look forward to more chances of practicing effective communication skills to gain more confidence when I am communicating with others in English. I also like to learn more of my weakness by the end of COM150, I hope that I will not just getting a pass in this course but also digging out more of my weaknesses and strength, so I will perform better in my future workplace.
