Page 150 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

Project Name: Manual for Soft Skills
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Interpersonal communication is satisfying to you when you
manage to satisfy your needs. In the case of interpersonal needs
you depend solely on others for their satisfaction. If others give you
the recognition you seek, or give you a chance to exert influence
when you wish to, or provide you with the close intimate atmo-
sphere you like, you feel satisfied and seek these people again in
other interpersonal situations. You tend to avoid, when you can,
the type of interpersonal communication situation where your
needs are generally thwarted.
An understanding of interpersonal needs is essential not only in
facilitating your insights into group processes but also in helping you
predict the situations that will be more or less satisfying and produc-
tive for you.

VAlUES, BElIEFS ANd ATTITUdES

You may often feel that your personal world is unique, peculiar to you,
and unshared by anyone else. You have great difficulties explaining a feel-
ing or an experience to someone else. Even when you manage to describe
the feeling or the experience with words you doubt that others know it as
you do.
However, people are peculiar. At the same time that you intuitively
believe in your uniqueness, you also assume that you live in the same world
as others do. You assume that what you see is what others see. Despite your
feelings of uniqueness your daily life is usually spent in a world you assume
is shared as much as unique.
This may be the vital function of communication. Were it not for human
communication or human contact you would live alone exclusively in your
world of uniqueness without getting confirmation of your experiences.
Confirmation of your experiences (or disclosing) not only involves the
physical world—checking your perceptions with others to test their reliabil-
ity. It also involves the social world—comparing your ideas about religion,
politics, morals, etc. with others to test their validity.
Because human beings are symbol-using creatures, they can create for
themselves rules of conduct which go beyond the mere needs for survival
of the species. When a animal raises her young, she does so because she is
programmed to do so in order for the young to survive and for the species
to continue to exist. When human parents raise their children, they are con-
siderably more involved with regard to feelings, societal expectations, laws,
duty, etc. Human beings create value systems from beliefs about the nature
of their world and as a result, learn to respond to their environment in some
ways more than in others.

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