Communication Evaluation

                This week’s assignment had us evaluate ourselves in three aspects of communication – Communication Anxiety, Verbal Aggressiveness, and Listening Style. We then were to have two other people evaluate us on the same aspects. This exercise was to let us see if our perceptions of ourselves as communicators matched up with how others perceive us.

                For this assignment, I chose to be evaluated by one of my daughters and one of my coworkers. My reasoning for this was that they know me in different ways and have seen me communicate in different contexts. As expected, my daughter’s evaluation was extremely close to my own evaluation; but my coworker’s evaluation was also very close to my own. I really didn’t know what to expect from my coworker’s evaluation, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was similar to my own. I think that the results of these two evaluations indicate that I was realistic in my own evaluation.

                One of the results of these evaluations that really surprised me was from the verbal aggressiveness survey. One of the statements was “When people refuse to do a task that I know is important, for no good reason, I tell them they are unreasonable.” My answer was rarely, my coworker answered almost never, and my daughter answered almost always. I found my daughter’s answer very disconcerting because it was so different from my own and yet she is the one who I feel knows me the best. I can only assume that she felt that I have done this to her in the past. The lesson that I took away from that is that I apparently am more aggressive with people when I am more comfortable with them; this is definitely something that I should keep in mind when communicating with people at work.