Interpersonal Communication

[Music] [Applause] [Music] we're going to be moving from intra-personal into inter-personal communication within the next few weeks so we're going from communication that happens within our heads to communication that's actually intended for another person so when we talk about interpersonal communication we're talking about one-to-one face-to-face interpersonal communication you're talking with another individual what this is going to do is it's going to point us to thinking intentionally about relationship building in a whole bunch of different contexts but before we dive into the specifics within interpersonal communication we want to walk through similar to intra-personal communication how

this can relate to different contexts and aspects in our life one thing that's going to stand out here is that the relational aspect is all the things of interpersonal communication there's not really something to narrow that down to because interpersonal and relational can kind of go hand in hand so instead i want to spend more time talking about the connections to spiritual and professional context in one's life when we think about spiritual contexts so context for our faith one thing that stands out to me is the importance of interpersonal relationships in accountability in mentorship and

in friendship and community with other believers one thing that a lot of people speak to is how we can go from a large church with many different people included to specific relationships within that church and how those relationships that are kind of spiritually or faith-focused can be very impactful in our own walk in our own journey with our faith so one thing to think about with this is that we often have this connection between interpersonal relationships and maybe romantic relationships people tend to put those together but it's not just romantic relationships that we need to

think about these types of spiritual interpersonal relationships could be the conversations that you have with your pastor or that you have with a friend or a colleague that's the same age or maybe that you have with kids within your faith community but all of these relationships would be centered around something spiritual something faith-based what that's going to do is it's going to provide us with a relational context to build our faith upon so that we can talk to one another about accountability and staying aligned with the things that we believe we can ask hard questions

we can get good feedback on what it is that we're doing or struggling with and within that spiritual realm i think that we can think about interpersonal communication as having a heavy role in what we do within that walk of life again i talked about how relational contexts are basically anything that you want to include when we think about interpersonal communication and again keeping in mind that when we talk about interpersonal communication we can talk about friendships we can talk about and we will talk about family relationships and family dynamics we'll talk about romantic relationships

we'll talk about workplace relationships and how all of those things can look different but that the interactions that we have often run in the same manner the last thing that i think is really important to think about is how interpersonal communication connects with our professional life and our professional context one way that you might come against or be experiencing interpersonal communication might be before you even get a job it might be in the job interview stage often when you interview for a position you'll have several interpersonal behavioral questions to answer and essentially what this part

of the interview is doing is trying to get a sense for how you would communicate with people within the workplace who you are as a person and what your perspective might be on different types of cultures and so even before landing a job you have to think about how you communicate who you are in an interpersonal setting once you're actually in a workplace environment your professional life and your professional career is going to be heavily impacted by the interpersonal relationships that you make with people within the bounds of the walls of your company i think

there's not enough emphasis on how impactful and important workplace relationships are on things like a worker's satisfaction with the work that they're doing these are people that if you're working a typical 40-hour week full-time job these are people that you might communicate with even more than people that you live with people that you're um that are in your home so your family or your friends and that is really a lot to think about because if you're interacting interpersonally with your colleagues there has to be something there that's um really digging into who you are as

a group of people how you're advancing your career and your job but it goes beyond that too if you're not sharing an interpersonal relationship with a colleague you don't talk about anything but work that's going to put a different lens on what your workplace environment is and looks like than if you're able to share outside of the bounds of work with one another so as we think about all these things going forward i really want you to think about interpersonal communication and how that could be a part of your spiritual life your relational life and

your professional life looking deeply into those contexts in the weeks to come as we start to dive into the components of interpersonal communication check done quit telling me that i'm not taking steps where did you find that i like that my fitbit is like you haven't moved for so many minutes what are you doing