Cross Culture

            Cross cultural communication is something that I have learned to really enjoy over the past couple of years.  In my letter to our recent speaker, I mentioned several instances in where I have been in cross cultural communication settings, mainly at work.  I work on golf course, where many Hispanics have working visas and work for eight months of the year in the US.  My background in Spanish consists of 4 years of high school education, which was followed by several years without much practice once graduated.  Once re-introduced to the Spanish language, I began picking up the language again.  As I learned more, I became more and more likeable by the Hispanic crew members.  I found out that because I was able to speak some of their language they were more willing to work with me and help me out.  After becoming more familiar with their circumstances, I realized that very few of them pick up English because they are always surrounded by Spanish, and rarely is English necessary for them in their everyday life.  Knowing this, they all still made attempts to make sense of the English language, while they then appreciated my attempts at their language.  Very seldom is this reciprocated, and often they are expected to pick up English since they live here, but I found out a lot about their culture by just being around them and communicating with them.  I guess this is just my background in cross cultural communication, and how sometimes minorities are given the short stick.  

Service Project Entry

Service Project

                So far I am about half-way through my hours for my service project.  I am currently spending 2 hours on Friday afternoons at the Malone center, located on 22^nd and vine ish.  I spend time with a diverse group of children, ranging from 5-13 in an after school program.  Many of these children are under privileged and can be very difficult at times.  The tough part about working with these kids is understanding their background before you discipline them or try to deal with their problems.  I find it very difficult to discipline these children for I fear them not responding to it well because they have never really been disciplined before.  For instance, I feel like it would be necessary for me to discipline kids for using foul language, however so many of them use it, I can’t punish them all. 

Realistically I would like to work with these kids and help them, but so many of them are stubborn and angry, they do not deal with confrontation or discipline well.  I, as a volunteer, understand that is not my responsibility to watch each kids every move, making sure they don’t get away with inappropriate things, but I feel like I don’t have the responsibility to punish the kids.  I have noticed that the kids do not respond well to passive instructions, things like, “can we not play like that” tend to go unheard but comments like, “if you play like that you will be in trouble” are often effective.  I struggle handing out mandates to these children; I have been programmed to at first work with the kids then if not listening, pursue more a more aggressive style.  I honestly am still working things through, trying to figure out the best way to work with the children.  They all seem to enjoy my company, but that may be due to me being willing to play with them on the playground rather than stand around.  But for a first glance at how things are going, I hope this is what you were looking for. 

Trust

Trust

                Trust, as it pertains to relationships, is such an interesting topic to me that I had to discuss it in my quiz.  Along with trust, I will show you how trust can be related to my life through my MBTI type.   Some of the following may be redundant with the conflict management portion, but hang with me as I do mean well.  I will also identify some important power and influence traits and how they are very important in this relationship.  For you to completely understand how these two are related I must first classify what exactly they are. 

                Trust, as seen in relationships, can be so simple yet to understand, but so difficult to grasp.  I know that the afore mentioned sentence might not make much sense, but as I try to properly articulate my thoughts, I struggle identifying the makeup of trust.  Trust is loyalty, sincerity, an emotion built upon reliance.  Once broken, it may never be mended.  We place our trust in some of the most ridiculous pipe dreams, or sports, and of course in our relationships.  Before I go on, I must admit guilt, because I too place trust in some of the following futile things.   Trust is believing that someone/something will come through; you predict reliance upon this someone/something.  Trust, simply put, can’t be defined with justice.

                Now that I have identified the role of trust in my life, how does my MBTI type affect it?  Well being an ESFJ, I think there are some rather important parts it could affect.  I am extroverted, I am constantly sharing my relationships with others, and expressing how I feel to those around me.  I think that one of the more important factors in building trust is directly related to the trust pyramid.  In order to trust someone, you must first open up.  Once two people can get past sharing basic data and cliché conversation, they can effectively build a relationship upon trust.  The ability to share about beliefs and individual feelings will increase the trust between two individuals.  The quickest way to getting to that level of communication is being able to express your own opinions and those around you will hopefully reciprocate that.   

                I think my feeling type makes me more sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of others, which is a crucial part of building trust.  If I cannot understand other people, or their problems, I will most likely not share with them my problems.  Identifying with another person and being able to relate is a very important part of building that trust.  Being a feeler, I tend to concern myself with the thoughts of others, making their life easier, and helping them out where possible.  I think that this trait helps me build trust by not criticizing their thoughts, but understanding them and furthermore, helping them with those feelings. 

                Lastly, here I want to conclude with some ways power and influences are related to the previous paragraphs.  I would say that there are no powers to influence, but types of influences used when assessing this topic.  Inspirational appeal is important because it deals with appealing to another’s beliefs, this would work in well if the level of trust is past basic data conversation and become more complex.  I would say that being an extrovert, I may use consultation, where my participation and input may directly affect whether or not another person would share their input.   Personal appeal would be important; an influence dealing with loyalty.  If you had known someone for a long time, and they broke your trust, you might be willing to forgive since they have been loyal to you for so long.  

Conflict Management

Conflict Management

                I chose conflict management because I believe it is a key component in our everyday lives; more importantly, we study conflict management to become more aware of it in the workplace.  Here I wanted to match up conflict management with my MBTI type.  Before I identify how I am connected to these two, I want to specifically discuss what they are.

  Firstly, conflict management can be identified as many things, but to be specific, I believe that conflict can be both good and bad.  In this situation I am going to identify why conflict can be bad, particularly in a workplace.   Conflict occurs when there are two or more differing values, opinions or even perspectives, and thus results in disagreeing parts.  Firstly, conflict can decrease productivity, and thus reducing the overall profitability of your workplace.  Other places conflict can cause problems are it can reduce workplace morale, also give rise to more conflicts and ultimately result in inappropriate workplace attitude. 

My MBTI type is ESFJ, I am a extroverted sensing feeling judging type.  There are a few areas of my type that I wanted to primarily focus on, mostly because I believe that some parts play a bigger role in conflict management for me.  Firstly, there is the fact that I am a feeler, meaning that in general, I value sentiment over logic.  I am very sensitive to other people’s needs and their feelings.  I am more likely to encourage someone rather than criticize them.  This part of me could be good and bad, because in a situation where I might be a supervisor, I might tend to be more concerned with others liking me opposed to doing it right.  In a situation where there is a conflict of values, I might side with someone I understand more rather than seeing it as an outsider.   Overall, I think that being a feeler might cause me to avoid more conflicts but might cause me to manage them poorly.

It is important to note that I am of the judging type, helping counter balance my feeling type.  I have the ability to override my feeling senses, especially when it gets in the way of work.   My judging type gives me a down to earth attitude which can be directly related to how I may resolve conflict, due to my ability to focus on the crucial components of that at hand.  It is important that I do not simply set my focus and make decisions rashly because that can create a situation where I commit to a solution too early.

Realizing that my MBTI personality is separate parts but work together is very important.  I cannot become too interested in how people might think of me when faced with conflict, nor should I attach myself to things I feel are important and thus discredit other components when in conflict.  These two work in unison, and it is important to use them both to my advantage.

In conclusion, I want to recognize power and influence, and how they might directly affect conflict management pertaining to my MBTI type.  Referent power would be a big one for my feeling personality, where I might be looking to gain someone’s approval.  Two influence types that could be correlated to the feeling type would be inspirational appeal as well as personal appeal.   Personal appeal deals with loyalty and friendship while inspirational appeal pertains to follower’s goals and values.   I think that all of these types of power and influence are potential tools in conflict management.  

Perception

Perception, in my own words is how we see things. Through emotions, feelings, visually and even through touch are we able to perceive things differently.  Many components make up our own perceptions, and have varying influences on the way we see things.  For instance, my background in religion might cause me to become intrigued when someone speaks on Catholicism or Mormonism, whereas someone who cares nothing about religion might perceive the person as boring.  Also, we saw from a video shown in class that our physical state affects our perception.  If we are overweight we might be self conscious due to the amount of media pressure.  Also, a blind person would be keener to things a person says as opposed to their non verbals.  But before I venture too far away I wanted to talk more about how our culture, especially here in the US, affects our way of life.  Each and every day our perceptions are changed due to our ever evolving society.  As a person living in this fast paced world, I feel like people are being consumed by the ever looming thought, “what might they think of me?”  It controls lives, as mentioned obviously in junior high, but still we are completely trapped by ideals that society has placed before us.  Why are we getting a higher education?  Because we are taught that in order to become an active part of society, we must be successful.  Parents still push their children to become the people they wish they could’ve been, and it makes me sad knowing that people pursue such shallow dreams.  A dream in which, your satisfaction is predicated upon whether or not you make a person happy, most times that person being yourself.  Our perception of happiness will continue to change, only if we hold onto what society deems important.  Sorry that was my little rant that got off topic; I hope it all makes enough sense. 

Trust Journal Entry

The Role of Trust in Our Lives

            Although not thought of as often as practiced, trust is a very important part of our lives.  Every day we take chances, but a majority of them are done without even the slightest consideration.  Simple examples like sitting in a chair or getting into a car are both ways we as individuals take risks and assume that they will cost us nothing.  For the most part, we have learned to trust our surroundings and our environment.   However, trusting your surroundings may be as easy but trusting an actual person may be more of a task.  Trust is something that is built over time, with things like commitment and loyalty.  In Thursday’s class last week we learned how difficult it is to actually place trust in someone that are not familiar with.  We were playing a game that had no repercussions, or adverse affects, but still group leaders were found hanging in the balance whether or not they should trust that person across the room.  Trust is not blind; there are many things/behaviors that influence our trust.  Things like past history with a person, or even one’s own ability to be honest with another person.  This chapter helped me identify how important trust actually is in our daily lives.  We count on people every day, we are accountable for the things we say and do, but all of that can be lost very quickly.  Trust is something hard to regain, but easy to lose.  

Online Communication

As our society continues to shift into a new digital era, we will most assuredly see more and more ways to communicate with others through means of the internet.  And while we do this remains unknown, other than the fact that we as people, are lazy and demand to have everything as convienent to us as possible.  However in doing this, we completely cut out an important part of our lives.  Not only can we as individuals be misunderstood through online communication, we can also be limited by perceptions of others.  We limit ourselves by creating an online personna and letting people make their assumptions of who we actually are.  This completely ruins the idea of communication.  

Simply stated, online communication misses important parts of communication, including non verbals and also active listening.  This reduces our ability to become active and good communicators.  We believe that by making things more convienent for us, that we help us be better communicators, but really we are only hurting our abiility to understand how people operate through communication.