The Door is Open
The concept of what other people think of us either becomes our whole world or becomes something we try to resist to become our own person. My first memory was when I was three years old in the family room of my first house. It was a three bedroom house in Parkersburg, West Virginia. My mom had just left the room to finish cooking dinner for the night. I was in the room with my dad who was recording me from across the relatively empty room. For some reason the way I remember this is from the perspective of my dad on the other side of the camera. I was thinking my own thoughts, but I saw myself as if I were my dad. I held in my hands one blue, one yellow, and one green plastic key. The keys had a smooth plastic feeling that soothed me and kept me calm. I was so hungry and craved something with flavor, and I decided the keys looked appetizing so I stuck them in my mouth. After I put them in my mouth I heard my dad start to chuckle. At first I laughed along with him, but then I felt like he was laughing at me rather than with me. I smelled the spices and heard the sizzle of my mom’s cooking from the other room so I left the flavorful keys in my mouth and started to cry. I question my dad to this day why he didn’t make me take them out and can still only illicit the response “I don’t know. I don’t even remember that”. As a three year old other people’s opinion of me did not really mean anything yet. At this point I decided that what the world (specifically my dad in this case) had a different perspective that I should also pay attention to. This led me to consider other’s opinions in my future endeavors.
My sister and I are both picky eaters which is probably the biggest pet peeve of both of my parents. One night ...
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...ht process from that memory when I was three evolved further on in my life. At the dinner with my family, and my dad’s colleagues I decided that other people had valuable opinions. I decided to listen to their opinions and found that my hypothesis was validated. I fell in love with the dish and realized that other people that I trust made recommendations for my own good. I integrated this new thought process along with my family when we go out to dinner. We all comment on what is going on in other people’s advice. Problems that have been stumping people get solved through advice of others in the family. The discourse and openness makes things easier for all of us. Being open had lead to drastic positive changes in my life. I am able to see myself through a different lens. This perspective lets me decide what kind of person I am and what kind of person I want to be.
Seeing things in other people perspective is crucial to keep a serene relationship between people. For instance, failure to consider another person’s point of view is one of the main causes of prejudice in the world. Prejudiced people judge preconceive opinions that are not based on reason or actual experience. For example, a prejudiced person might look at a homeless person with disdain and say, “Get a job or get lost!” From the prejudiced persons point of view, the homeless person is unwilling to work, lazy, and
Charles Horton Cooley used the term looking-glass self to mean a person’s self-image based on how they think others see them (Macionis, page 108; Cooley, 1964, original 1902). This theory is fairly straightforward. How a person views himself is based on how he thinks other people see him. I have done and will do throughout my life. If I think the people at school think that I am quiet, then I will view myself as a quiet person. If I think my friends at church think I am a good listener, then I will view myself as a good listener. The danger of the looking-glass self is that it can greatly harm a person’s self-esteem. It can also give people a false sense of pride and make people have large egos.
"The greatest challenge in life is discovering who you are. The second greatest is being happy with what you find."- Unknown. I have learned so much this year alone and taking an interpersonal communication class has broadened my view of myself and others. I am going to take you on a journey of what I learned and what I am continuing to learn. First I have chosen four chapters of the book that I think I have developed and learned the most from. From these chapters I picked the concepts and the theories that I have revised within myself. Starting with chapter two Considering Self, Perceiving Others, Experiencing and Expressing Emotions, Managing Conflict and last but not least Relationships with Family Members. I think that
My friends and I spent recesses writing about our idiosyncratic observations about the world we lived in and I loved every single page. I was fascinated by the fact that I would never experience the world through their lenses, or even through the lens of any other human being on this planet. With even a slight variation in experience, people’s opinions and viewpoints diverge into something completely distinctive.
I like to think of myself as a critically-thinking individual who comes to conclusions solely based on personal analysis of the world around me. “The Cycle of Socialization” by Bobbie Haro reminds me that I am largely a reflection of the cultures and spaces I occupy and the family members and institutions who taught and reinforced my norms, values, and dogma. Thinking of my upbringing as “systemic” sheds a different perspective on my realities.
As I reflect on this autobiography project, I feel that I found some reasons for my thoughts and behaviors. I do not follow many of the strict values like religion; I seem to follow the path of the males in the family. My adjustment to blindness was both helped and hindered from both my parents. My father encouraged me to explore and not to be discouraged by failure or defeat, while my mother kept strongly encouraging me to improve my life. As I eventually get married and start my own family, I will understand the importance of expressed emotions and how my upbringing influenced my roles in the present and future families.
In order to understand how one perceives situations and how they can determine the way one communicates; we first must understand the value of self-concept. Self is easily defined; it is one's beliefs, attitudes, feelings and values. It is who one is and what one stands for. Self-concept, is a relevantly stable set of perceptions and emotional states. It is the way one sees and understands oneself, and contributes to how one perceives oneself and perceives situations. One's self-concept may alter their perception, and either enhance or impede one's communication effectiveness. The way one sees oneself can influence the way they see their social surroundings. Only after one become aware of oneself can they be aware of their physical and social surroundings, which will allow one to perceive situations and people with a truer idea and create a more positive outcome.
transition here to conclusion→ Experiences shape our lives; the good and bad, have altered our outlook on life and our future. Experiences that we encounter influence our thinking, perceptions, ideas, and beliefs and how we react to our experiences shape our lives. Problems are inevitable and hard to avoid, but it is our ability to turn bad situation into something inspirational and good in our lives that says a lot about our character. Instead of focusing on the problems in our lives, we should focus on the opportunities given to us to learn from the experiences. Change will only happen in our lives when we have a change of attitude towards the negative situations in our life. The ability to turn a bad influence or situation into something positive opens up new behaviors and the chance for happiness.
the door for the people behind them. Another possibility is that there is a social
Perception of one’s self begins early in life. For me, it began as being a little sister. My older sister was six when I was born and due to that age difference, was also a kind of parent to me. I knew I was to be the compliant, cute little sister and spent my younger years trying to live up to the little sister standard. It took years to develop what sisterhood really was into my self-concept.
The looking glass self is a concept by Charles Cooley that has three steps. The first step is how an individual imagines how they appear to others, secondly, they imagine what judgments people have of them based on their appearance, and the third is how they imagine what a person feels by the judgments that were made about them (Vogt Isaksen, 2012). Basically, individuals will conform to how they think others see them. For example, if a parent or family member constantly degrades a child, the child will start to believe that they are not worthy of anything and vice versa. George Mead believed in the study of “self” that a person will learn through social interactions (Keirns et al., 2015). Meads believed that this is a learned process and that children learn it through imitation. In doing this it will lead the way for an individual to be able to view the world from different perspectives and to help them become self-aware. Cooley and Mead’s theories believe that through socialization individuals will develop who they will become and what cultural beliefs they will
The way that each individual interprets, retrieves, and responds to the information in the world that surrounds you is known as perception. It is a personal way of creating opinions about others and ourselves in everyday life and being able to recognize it under various conditions. Each person’s perceptions are used as a kind of filter that every piece of information has to pass through before it determines the effect that it has or will have on the person from the stimulus. It is convincing to believe that we create multiple perceptions about different situations and objects each day. Perceptions reflect our opinions in many ways. The quality of a person’s perceptions is very important and can affect the response that is given through different situations. Perception is often deceived as reality. “Through perception, people process information inputs into responses involving feelings and action.” (Schermerhorn, et al.; p. 3). Perception can be influenced by a person’s personality, values, or experiences which, in turn, can play little role in reality. People make sense of the world that they perceive because the visual system makes practical explanations of the information that the eyes pick up.
In life, we often look to others for validation, our family, friends, or even strangers. Throughout life, as we evolve, validation plays a prominent role in all of our lives. From a young age we are taught to see approval and validation from others. In fact, as children, we are taught to look to our parents for a smile or a nod of reassurance and approval for our choices. This teaches us that throughout life, we should look to others for their validation for confirmation. From a young age we are taught to compulsively seek others approval, however, when evaluating why we seek validation, we find that validation and approval is found within.
We tend to try to understand our self and how we are as a person then we try to act and behave accordingly as to whom we are and this concept is called self-concept. This is our idea of which we are our understanding of our self (Mcleod, 2008). This composes of our belief about our self, our attitude and behavior and our opinion as how we are supposed to behave and how we really behave (Feenstra, 2011). As for me, my self-concept is that I am a worrier and I said this because I always end up telling other people about my worries so I share it with them. This is very different with my friend who always keeps her taught to herself and stays aloof all the time. Then aside from our self-concept, we also have what we call our self-schema. Self-schema is the way we look at ourselves hence it can be associated with what we liked to do. My self-schema is that I am a gardener because I love working on my garden. Every time I see something about gardening, I can easily associate myself with it because of my self-schema hence my behavior shows how I perceive myself. Self-schema is the same as self-awareness hence I am aware of myself either publicly or privately. Private self-awareness ar...
There are two theories that describe how interactions shape our self-views. One defines perceptions of the judgments of others called Reflected Appraisal. It is the notion of receiving supportive and nonsupportive messages. It states that positive appreciation and a high level of self-value is gain when supportive messages are received. In contrast, receiving nonsupportive messages leads to feeling less valuable, lovable, and capable. Everyone that you and I interact with influences these self-evaluations. Either from your past or from present –all shapes how you view yourself, especially from our significant others. The strength of messages from significant others become stronger and eventually affect the health, when they are nonsupportive; depression, for instance, leads to less physical activities that are necessary for a healthy body. However, the foremost important influences are our parents. Supportive parents raise children with healthy self-concepts. While nonsupportive parents raise an unhappy child who view his/her self in negative ways.