[Music] [Applause] [Music] in this video i want to have a conversation about how interpersonal communication one of those five forms that we discussed at the beginning of the semester actually informs three different aspects of our life i'm hoping to do this every week when we dive into a new form of communication to really center us to be thinking about how the forum in and of itself isn't only applicable in one context but it's actually applicable across many so the first thing that i want to do is remind us what intra-personal communication actually is again this
is one of those forms of communication that is the least researched among all five in that it's a lot of interior communication if you want to think about it that way you are communicating with yourself within your own head or maybe even written words on a page or something to maybe remind you of what you're thinking about in your environment but the goal of interpersonal communication is not to share something with the world with others but to really remind yourself or tell yourself something specifically what i want to focus on is how interpersonal communication is
heavily tied to the self and the self concept we're going to be digging into this a little bit in future lecture videos but you really need to be thinking about how interpersonal communication is informed by and informs how you are communicating with others because interpersonal communication is all about who you believe yourself to be and what you take from that into situations and conversations with other people whenever we talk about the three different contexts that this might apply to we can think about how this might manifest in different ways so i want to start with
the spiritual when we think about our faith or our religion or our spiritual communication with ourself this type of communication can look several different ways one thing that i think is really interesting is to think about how our ideas about our self can actually influence our prayer life there's a book written quite a few years ago that talked about who i am is how i pray and this is a really interesting component to think about because often prayer is not something that we do out loud there could be instances where we are praying out loud
but usually when that happens we are praying for other people and it's not just something for ourself so when prayer happens in your head yes you might be communicating with god you might be praying with somebody or to somebody but all of that communication is staying inside your own mind and what's going to come out in that in an interpersonal sense is your personality your self-concept i am going to pray differently than how you pray and what that is reflective of is what i think about myself and how i think that i need to communicate
about my needs or my wants or my desires how i need to think about my relationship with god and so you can think about how your thoughts on who you are on what you value on what you believe on how you think you interact with people actually influences how you pray another thing to keep in mind too is that interpersonal communication happens when you're reminding yourself of things throughout the day maybe you aren't consciously aware of the fact that you are talking to yourself but there are moments when we're walking across campus or when we're
grocery shopping or maybe even driving when we're thinking about stuff and sometimes the interpersonal communication that's happening there can be things that are tied to our spiritual life for instance i have some letter boards like the one on the back wall in my office and one of those i tend to keep as a quote dealing with gratitude in some way shape or form because that's a message that i continuously tell myself in the bounds of my own head as a reminder to be grateful for the things that i have or the experiences that i'm going
through that in and of itself is a spiritual practice of practicing gratitude and if i'm not saying it outwardly it's not because it's not something that i want other people to know but it's something that i want to remind myself of daily outside of the spiritual we can also think about how interpersonal communication can be connected to relational communication or relationships or relationship contexts this might be a hard stretch for some people because if you're only communicating within your own head how can this apply to others how can this apply to your relationships one thing
to think about is that we are often reflecting in our own minds on who we want to be in a relationship whether that's a friendship a familial relationship a romantic relationship we have this idea of what we think we bring to the relationship as a whole and what we want to bring or how we want that relationship to look so those reflections on what you want your role to be in a relationship or what you want your friendship workplace relationship familial relationship to look like those things are happening in your head and you're reflecting on
experiences you're reflecting on things that you've said or done and thinking about whether or not that's going to be a meaningful positive experience and interaction to move a relationship forward now those intrapersonal communications might become outward manifestations at some point you might talk to a friend about a conflict that you had and how you felt you handled it but at first it might be something that is simply internal lastly i want to talk about professional context and interpersonal communication this is something i think that is interesting because often when we're tackling workplace projects or we're
applying for a job or we're trying to do something um career based with our life we have this voice in the back of our head which might be our own that's telling us about our worth of um what we're doing or how good we are at what we're doing in that moment this is something that's particularly salient to me because my son has recently been very engrossed in the cars movies and lightning mcqueen is someone who does intra-personal communication to himself about his job all the time at the beginning of every movie it seems it's
a black screen and all you hear is lightning mcqueen saying to himself i am speed i am speed and it's really adorable to see a three-year-old saying that to himself as i shut um but that's interpersonal or inter intra-personal communication that is you telling yourself i'm good at what i'm doing or i have the ability to do this thing really well and often we can find ourselves either doubting our abilities that we have to complete a job or we have confidence in what we are doing and we feel like we have the tools needed to
do something really well and your viewpoint on how you think you're doing or if you have the skills to do something well that message that you're telling yourself is going to impact the work that you actually do and so we're going to spend the first week um digging into this form of communication focusing on and maybe asking yourself hard questions about what messages do you tell yourself um do you tell yourself i'm good at what i do i have a lot of talents or do you tell yourself i don't really know that i'm good at
anything because that in of itself is going to impact all of your future conversations interactions and essentially the work that you're going to be doing intra-personally i don't know how i feel about that yes okay i am speed i did the thing
