Chapter One: Communication & the Changing World of WOrk

I believe that no matter what age you are at in life, you are always changing—always growing as an individual. We began this process as infants and during our childhood years our ideas and beliefs were given to us by our family. As we have gotten older, we have come across our own ideas and guidelines, and some of the beliefs for life that have been given from our family will always stick with us, but as the years go by and we are continuously given new opportunities to grow with ideas—everything will change. This is where we will develop our first concepts of worldviews.
The chapter says, “We spend our lives as members of numerous social groups: family, church, school, business, and country. Our membership on these groups shapes our sense of self. At the same time, participation in these groups requires interaction with others who are often different from us.”
In order to function in our society, one must learn how to effectively communicate with others. And in today’s society—we will constantly come across people who have been raised differently than us, with a completely opposite background of worldviews. Not to say that this is wrong, it is good to come across other people’s ideas, and life experiences. It is one of the reasons why we are always growing and changing individually.
One of the hardest challenges that I have had in communication and the world of work has been in group projects with school. During middle school and high school, I began to see that there is always at least one individual who would slack off, and expect the rest of us to get that ‘A.’ The balance of the workload never seemed fair. My parents would always say that in the end even if we were all receiving the same grade, the teacher would know who had done the work and who had not. Then college came, and the amount of group projects seemed to have tripled, and I have constantly found myself in a battle with group members who just do not seem to care, and would be happy with a ‘C.’ But that isn’t how I function. I have always had the idea that I must get that ‘A,’ because the type of projects that we are given are actual business proposals, they are very similar to the ones we will be given in the “real world of work.” And if I can’t excel in the work now, how will I be able to in my job?
This last semester something different suddenly hit me, I began to wonder if maybe I was contributing to this problem that I seemed to repeatedly comes across in group projects. I knew that there were students in my classes who worked as hard as I did, and who had just as good of ideas if not better than I did, so why was I always teamed up with people who did not share these work ethics—why was I always feeling like I had to do all of the work in order to get that ‘A’?
I decided that I was not communicating effectively with these people. I began to slow myself down and spend more time communicating with them. Instead of getting frustrated with their quality of work, I started to point out their strengths in the work that they were contributing, and then I would suggest what could be done differently, and I would ask them to do the same for the work that I had done. It didn’t all come easy, it was definitely a challenge at times. Instead of wanting to complete specific tasks to the project alone and then submitting the work together through email and such, I began asking if we could meet in person more often. I finally realized that If I couldn’t find a common understanding with how to effectively work together for group projects in school, then I was going to have an even more difficult time outside of school and in the work force. I realized that it takes two to communicate effectively, and it’s an ongoing process—just like our lives are constantly changing, our communications skills are as well.