Style of Interpersonal Communication

This assignment will allow you to create a paper, which will examine how the interpersonal communication concepts we have studied and the interpersonal relationships you have experienced have influenced the development of your communication style. Your goal in this essay is to take some specific interpersonal ideas and do a self-analysis of the role they play in your communication style. You will provide information about how this role may have changed as you have developed. A second part of this paper entails how others have influenced the development of your communication. This paper is supposed to be about me, however, you can make up my personality and communication skills as you go. Also, please label each section with each corresponding letter.

Areas to cover in a research paper on the style of interpersonal communication:

1. Provide an introduction where you tell me what the goal of your paper is.
2. Describe you style of interpersonal communication to me. You can choose to do this however you would like. Basically, if someone asked you to describe how you communicate, what are some of the trademark things you do that define your style? What would you say are three communication strengths and three weaknesses that you have?
   
3. Describe your listening skills. What specifically do you do when you listen? Are you satisfied with how you listen?
   
4. Interpersonally, how would you describe your nonverbal communication?
   
5. How do roles affect how you communicate?
   
6. How much of your communicator style has been influenced by your gender or culture.
   
7. How much of your interpersonal style is comprised of interpersonal influence or trying to get others to comply to your requests? How do you do this?
8. How is your communication different between family members, romantic relationships, and friends?
   
9. What do you think others perceive of you and your communication? Is this consistent with what you want? (I'm generally shy around new people) Q. What single event or person do you feel has had the greatest impact on you as a communicator? Who has most affected your communication style?
10. Describe the person and give the effect. Give examples of the effect in your life. How long lasting do you believe this effect will be.
11. Don't forget a conclusion.

Interpersonal Styles via Myers-Briggs

The boss cannot understand why a couple committee members are never quite satisfied with the decisions made at the last committee meeting and complain that no one listens to them. The tendency seems to be to conclude that the other person is wrong, picky, quirky, sabotaging and worse. Sometimes such conclusions can lead to a dissatisfying marriage relationship or termination of employment or the end of a friendship. The stereotypical solution is to improve interpersonal communication. The assumption being that if everyone just talks their difference out problems will be solved. As explored in this paper, a way of improving interpersonal communication is to have a greater understanding of your own personality and the personality of others. Specifically, this paper will explore how applying the Myers-Briggs (personality types) Type Indicator to relationships can reduce conflict, increase appreciation for the differences in others and improve interpersonal communication.

Isabel Briggs Myers and Katherine Cook Briggs started to develop the MBTI in the early 1940s "to make C.G. Jung's theory of human personality understandable and useful in everyday life." (APT) First the model suggests each of us have "type" preferences which fall somewhere along four different continuums.

Those continuums include:
Extroversion (E) <---------------------------> Introversion (I)
Sensing (S) <--------------------------------> Intuition (N)
Thinking (T) <-------------------------------> Feeling (F)
Judging (J) <--------------------------------> Perceiving (P)

Briefly, each of these on the continuum have specific definitions which are summarized below.

ISTJ, ISTP, ESTP, ESTJ, ISFJ, ISFP,
ESFP, ESFJ, INFJ, INFP, ENFP, ENFJ,
INTJ, INTP, ENTP, and ENTJ

In other words, someone who is an INTJ is an Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging person while the opposite on every continuum would be someone who is an ESFP, that is an Extroverted, Sensing, Feeling, Perceptive. People with any given personality type will find themselves born into families, marrying, working and having friends or neighbors who are opposites on any or all of continuums representing a different personality type. How can understanding your own personality type and that of the others aid in interpersonal communication? The remainder of this paper will explore this question by first describing the two personality types noted in the previous paragraph. Following this, the writer will present a description of how knowing your own and the other person's personality type aids in improving interpersonal communication.