week 3 Interpersonal skills

Interpersonal conflicts are sometimes inevitable and would happen even with your close ones. In the case of S and J, the issues that came to pass are: should the effort that one friend put in for the friendship, be equal to that of the other?

S and J have been good friends for a long time now. J has a more helpful personality and has always helped S whenever S needed help.

Thus when S has to work at a very far place before 5am, J volunteered to drive S to work. However, there was once, J could not make it because she has worked overnight and wanted to sleep in. S was angry that J refused to help her and that the reason was she wanted to sleep in. So, S called J and chewed her out on the phone. J on the other hand, thought that S was not being understanding and took her help for granted. J replied that S was selfish and only wanted to make use of her. J then hanged up on S. Since then, they have gotten into a kind of cold war.

We are always told that friends should help one another but in this case, did S make use of J’s friendship to get J’s help? Or was J being too petty or even selfish? In addition, the emotions of S and J played an important part and needed to be understood. Why did S felt so angry when J has no obligation to help her? Why did J felt that she was made use of when she helped S in the past willingly?

Last and most importantly, could they have made the situation better?

Week 2 Effective Communication Skills

Communication has always seems to me a difficult thing. I used to think that communication only needs a good command of English/or your language, but then I soon realize that effective communication really needs more effort than just that.
Personally, I think effective communication is important for me (that’s why I spend 900++ bid points for this moduleJ). Firstly, when you graduate, you will need good communication skills to get pass the interview to get your ideal job. After you got the job, effective communication and good interpersonal relationship will be as important as your working capability. You need to maintain a healthy working relation with your boss and your colleague to prevent unhealthy competitions and nasty rumors. Even in university now, I can already understand the importance of this, especially in my CCA (Wind Band), interacting with other band members is a big part of band activities.
To put in my own experience, when I was in secondary school, there was once I had not listened carefully to my teacher in a lab session and had accidentally caused a small fire (luckily no one was injured). In another more recent case, I misinterpreted the test question in a CA and put in a lot of unneeded answers (a page long).
Not to forget, communicating with your close ones also needs you to put in effort. Otherwise, misinterpretations of feelings and motive can put strains on the relationship.
Communicating well is something I find it quite difficult and so for the past few years I have been avoiding it like voicing my inquiry to my lecturers and even my opinions to my friends. The result is that I become even not confident and not comfortable to speak out. However, I believe by having the willingness to learn and change (speak up more), I can definitely improve my communication skills.




Calvin and Hobbes from Gocomics at
http://www.gocomics.com/feature_items/explore?page=3&tag=13008
by Bill Watterson