Trust

The concept I decided to choose from this chapter dealt with trust in personal relationships.  Trust involves believing in another's reliability and emotionally relying on another to look our for our welfare and our relationship.  Trust involves work in the beginning of any relationship, and must be constantly growing to see a relationship grow and succeed.  It can be considered a proving ground between people to see if the relationship is one that can be pursued.  This can be a relationship involving friendship or romantically pursuance.  Either way it builds a relationship with someone that we want to have in our lives.  Trust shows us that we can take steps with someone that we normally wouldn't with someone that we don't trust.  In other words we take risks with these individuals.  It also allows us to disclose personal information about ourselves that we normally wouldn't with others.  This is crucial to be able to open up when we need someone to talk to.

Confirmation

The three different confirmations include recognition, acknowledgement, and endorsement.  Recognition recognizes that another person exists.  Acknowledgement is when you understand and acknowledge what others feel, think, or say.  Finally, endorsement involves accepting what another feels or thinks.  I feel that I am someone that people can approach with a dilemma that they are preoccupied with in life.  I always recognize people that I know directly, and when they need someone to talk to I am there for them.  I try to be like this towards others since I would want them to be the same way if the roles were reversed and I needed someone that I could approach.  I try to understand and listen the best I can so I can see where they are coming from, and try to understand how they are feeling at the moment in time.  If I am able to accomplish this then I can truly understand what they are feeling, and know how they are dealing with it too.

Defensive Conversations

When it comes to acting defensive in a conversation or argument I can think of plenty of times that I have been.  I tend to take a lot after my mother in personality and emotions.  Like her I consider myself strong-willed, determined, stubborn, and opinionated.  Due to some of these similarities I tend to be defensive on particular subjects and in arguments.  I have been in arguments with friends, family, and my girlfriend and I tend to be defensive on my side of the story when I feel I'm being attacked.  Certain times I tend to be wrong and other times I tend to be right.  Either way I notice myself never always taking a defensive stance on the subject.  I place this more on a factor of pride since I don't like being wrong.  I need to learn that sometimes I just need to learn to "bite the bullet" to resolve the issue from getting way more out of control than it needs to be.  This is an issue that is not easy for me to resolve since it's a trait that I feel has been lingering since I was a teenager, but it doesn't mean that it is impossible to accomplish.

Weekly Concept

Social expectations is a concept that really made me think about how I express and hold in particular emotions of how I feel.  For me, I was raised to be a strong and non-emotional person.  My father always told me to be compassionate, but to also not show weakness at the same time.  I didn't really know how to go about this until I realized how both my parents, but mainly my father raised me and my brother.  He was a very loving and caring person when it came to our family.  Yet when my brother or I did something wrong and had to be punished he would have to be that stern adult figure that couldn't show weakness from withholding our punishment.  I used to hate how we would be so stern on us, but now I understand why he did it.  He was preparing us for the real world, and that knowing what consequences became of wrongful actions.  He wanted us to learn what it took to be a "man" in the adult world when we became independent from the family.  It's a lesson that I have followed and kept to heart since I understood what he was teaching us.

Fallacies

Men and women have always had expectations on what kind of emotions to express in our society.  Women are supposed to be sensitive and not show signs of anger, while men need to show the opposite.  For me I don't like to show my emotions on a regular basis.  It probably has to do with a pride issue that I have, but also because of my social status and expectations as a man.  People that know me always see me as this strong willed individual that doesn't show off emotions since I can usually control them.  What I need to start doing is being honest with myself, and others about my emotions.  I'm not saying that deep down I'm a over sensitive cry baby, but I need to be able to express more of my emotions rather than bottling them in.  It definitely doesn't help since doing that only causes me stress frustration.

Perspectives and Emotions

The perspective that I can relate to the most is physical influences when it comes to emotions.  I feel that this one is a major one for a lot of people since we are always surrounded by things that can cause emotions of all kinds.  This can be intentional or unintentional depending on what it is that triggers the emotion.  The funny thing is we could see emotions out of people that we don't normally see.  Sometimes we view this as a surprise or funny depending if we don't normally see that particular emotion.  My girlfriend stubbed her toe the other day in her condo, and she started swearing up a storm.  My first reaction was laughing at her because of the things she was saying while she was on the ground in pain.  She looked at me with some of the angriest eyes I never seen and asked what I thought was funny.  I told her I was laughing at what she was disclaiming out loud and not that she hurt herself.  She started laughing since she realized that she said some crude and out of the ordinary things that she normally wouldn't say.

Chapter Concept: The Process Of Becoming A Better Listener

We listen to sounds of every kind throughout our day, beginning when we wake up.  Let's face it anybody can listen, but it's a matter of what we want to listen to and process in our heads.  Sometimes we care about what we're hearing, and there are other times when we don't care at all.  This can be extremely harmful if someone is trying to disclose something to us and we blow them off by not paying attention, or not caring.  It can ruin relationships of any kind.  Again anyone that can or has the ability to can listen, but what does it take to be an experienced listener.  Listening requires being mindful, receiving physical messages, selecting and organizing material, interpreting communication, responding, and remembering.  Seems like a lot more work and motivation once we realize there are many steps to being a good listener.  Yet following these steps helps us by making us more approachable to people since they will look at you for disclosure.  All these steps are important, but I feel that mindfulness is the important.  This is not only because it is the first step, but also because it lets the other person know that you are there paying attention to what they are wanting to say.  If we all learn to become better listeners then we are only enhancing ourselves, and our relationships.

Listening: A 10 Part Skill

The ten parts that make up listening consist of finding an area of interest, judging content and not delivery, holding your fire, listening for ideas, being flexible, working at listening, resisting distractions, exercising your mind, keeping your mind open and finally capitalizing on thought speed.  Listening is an activity that we do throughout our lives.  Listening is a major factor for succeeding in college for example.  If we don't pay attention to what the instructors are giving us then the chance of failure rises drastically.  This can be linked to me since I'm one of those people that needs to constantly be moving, or doing something productive.  I am not saying that my education isn't productive, but I hate being stuck at a desk for long periods of time.  It makes me lose interest, and in turn decreases the amount of information that I process since I'm not listening as well.  Reading about these skills hopefully will change this about myself, and make me a better listener in all aspects of my life.

Defensive Listening

If I had to choose one type of listening that I need to improve on it is defensive listening.  Defensive listening can be seen as receiving criticism, but taking it only as a negative and not as improvement.  At first I never really thought I included myself in this factor of listening, but I have come to realize that I have become naive to it until now.  When I think about past conversations I've had with family, friends, and my girlfriend there were times that I definitely was guilty of defensive listening.  When I got criticized about my flaws I would avoid the subject and walk away from the problem.  It ended up causing a bigger problem with people I care about since it would end up dragging on much longer than it needed to.  It would also be my tendency to get defensive about what was being said by yelling back at them and calling them out on flaws they had to take the problem off of me.  To help fix this problem I need to learn to control my emotions.  It's not an easy fix since it takes time to break a habit that's been happening for years.  Yet it's the best way to go about it since I want to help improve my relationships with the people I hold close to me, but also to help improve myself.