Professional Documents
Culture Documents
COMM 2110
project. My goal is to become more assertive when I communicate my ideas, thoughts, and
conflicts in general. Therefore, to accomplish this goal I followed the steps of how to
communicate assertively. This new skills that I gained were successfully applied in my daily
interactions with my roommates, but was certainly not easy to implement at my workplace.
supervisor to avoid pseudo conflict at work and home with this strategy I avoided some
conflicts. Additionally, during this project I noticed that the way I was communicating
before was not completely effective. But after implementing the strategies I learned from
My ineffective communication habit was to not know how to communicate assertively and
as well as never asking for clarification to others when I had a conflict. I wanted to change
this pattern because I want to learn how to stand up for my own opinions and do it in a
precise and respectful way. Though I tend to avoid conflict with people, I noticed that doing
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that was not helping me solve anything. To better illustrate my points, I have two examples
One situation occurred when my roommates were talking about how to set up the
schedule to clean up our house. At first, no one was agreeing on whom would be the first
person that would start with the cleaning tasks, so they just decided that I would be first
one to start off cleaning. I did not agree with the decision because I had cleaned up the
house recently. And I felt that there were others roommates that did not try to clean at all,
so in my opinion, they were the ones that should have started first. Even so, I did not speak
was eventually letting them to behave in an unfair way towards me. This pattern of
understood that keeping a good use of assertive communication should not to be confused
Another situation where a conflict was present was at work. When I was talking
with my supervisor, I noticed that she was upset with me. She said that I had forgot to send
a few emails to our clients. When she finished her statement, I said to her, in a calm manner
that I had done, but I did not have the evidence. However, while explaining the situation to
her, I did not notice that I was smiling at her while speaking. I then realized this was a
mistake when my supervisor asked me to be serious about the matter. At that moment, I
did not keep the proper attention to my nonverbal messages, and consequently, a
professionalism in my work duties. And that was not the message that I was trying to
convey. However, after learning that monitoring nonverbal messages plays an important
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role in the way how others will interpret us, I now pay more attention to this particular
nonverbal signs when I talk with others. With this skill, I can now avoid some
Strategies
1. I changed the way of how I describe (Step one of how to be assertive) the situation
2013, p.181)
2. I expressed my feelings about the situation or problem to build empathy with them.
3. I identified the effects of their behavior. I told them how their actions make me feel
4. After these steps, I waited silent for their response. I avoided showing contradictory
5. At the end, I paraphrased the explanation, thoughts and feelings that my roommates
told to me. When their answers were negative or unresponsive I started over from
An example where I put these strategies into practice will be better explained below.
I talked to my roommate about how noisy she was the other night. I started describing the
situation by saying, I noticed that you like to watch movies late at night with a high
volume, and our rooms are very close. I felt uncomfortable and annoyed me a little bit
when you watched TV that day time with that high volume because you woke me up and I
needed to rest well to go to classes the next day. I immediately waited for her response.
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She stated that she was not aware of that issue and then apologized. I said, I understand
that you like to watch movies, and so do I. But at least, keep the volume down so both can
To avoid pseudo conflict at work and with my roommates, I followed the strategy of
Check Your Understanding of What Others Say and Do (Beebe, Beebe, Redmond, 2014, p.
246) This strategy is about paraphrasing the message that someone says to us to clarify our
understanding, and also to cheek if we are on the same page. I also followed the strategy of
Conflict Management Skills: Monitor Nonverbal Messages (Beebe, Beebe, Redmond, 2014,
p.243). This skill teaches us about the importance of the proper implementation of
nonverbal language while we are expressing our ideas. If we said something important to
someone but we are smiling at the same time the other person will take our message as a
topic without importance. An example where I put in practice these strategies and the
My supervisor told me that my Power Point presentation was not complete. She said
that I needed to talk about the services we provide as well as the locations and hours of
service. Also, she did not like the font size and color of the letters. So, I said to her if Im
understanding right, Victoria, you are saying the Power Point presentation content needs
to have a change of color and font size, and that our new branch office information is
missing, too. In this example, I also monitored my nonverbal language while talking to her
to avoid contradictory messages in that situation. Little seconds later, Victoria stated, yes
those are the changes that needs to be changed and added, respectively. The other parts of
keeping my nonverbal actions on the same page with my message was very important in
Constrains
The challenge that I found to improve my communication skills was on the strategy of
checking my understanding of what others say and do. Asking for clarification during my
Implementation
Knowing the aspect where I have to put more work I started first working with the
questions short and in a precise way helped me improve on this aspect. Some of the
questions that I used were, Could I have more details about it? Could you explain it to me?
What are you referring to? I also remained patient when I was trying to perfect these skills
Results
After working on the strategies that I learned from the book, I can now say that the
outcome is positive because I can see a difference on the way of how I was communicating
before and now. These skills helped me to develop the knowledge that I gained from the
Recommendations
I want to continue practicing these skills in my future interactions because I was able to see
the practical suggestions from the Conflict Management Skills: Manage Your Emotions
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because my emotions are still interfering with the message that I want to communicate.
That, for sure, will be my future goal to improve my interpersonal communication skills.
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Works Cited
Beebe, Beebe, & Redmond. (2014). Interpersonal Communication: Relating to Others. 7th