We continued our discussion of Interpersonal Effectiveness by talking about our experiences dealing with others. Each member shared an experience during the previous week when they needed to act effectively. Each example was different and actually targeted a different objective, which made for a nice teaching point because the next part of the module was determining what your goals are and how to decide on what to do.
Sammy talked about 3 different types of goals for each interpersonal situation and how deciding on which of the three goals was most important would help guide your interaction. The 3 types of goals are:
- Objectives. Ask yourself: “What do I want out of the interaction?”
- Relationship. Ask yourself: “How do I want the other person to feel about me after the interaction?”
- Self-Respect. As yourself: “How do I want to feel about myself after the interaction?”
For each interaction, you can break your internal conflicts into one of the 3 categories. Once you do that, try rank ordering them to give you a sense of what’s really important for you to get out it. Many times, you may find yourself always prioritizing one of those 3 questions (e.g., always worrying how someone else is going to feel about you) when that may get in the way of your goal (e.g., getting a raise). The trick to this is to make sure that you honor what you feel, in your wise mind, is most important, not what your “reason mind” or “emotion mind” tell you is most important.
We next went over the worksheet labeled “Interpersonal Effectiveness Handout 3″, to talk about things that may limit your effectiveness. These are relatively self-explanatory, but the gist of the worksheet is that we can often find various things that keep us from being effective. For example, you find that you are very effective in one particular type of situation but be completely unable to be effective in another. The goal for this handout is to help you figure out what it is that’s keep you from being effective.
Homework was page 130: prioritizing your goals and factors that may have limited your effectiveness. See you next week!
Announcement: Last group of this semester will be August 24th.