"A person's a person no matter how small"-Dr. Seuss

            Completing the communication assessments was enlightening and validated my perceptions of myself as an effective communicator professionally and personally.   I chose a colleague and my husband to assess my communication skills, along with my own personal assessment.   I had hoped that my sense of positive self-efficacy was equally perceived by others around me.   Self-efficacy is the result of a positive feeling (self-esteem) about one’s effectiveness with a clear sense of self (self-concept) (O’Hair, Wiemann, Mullin, & Teven, 2015).   Throughout all three surveys, both participants scored my communication characteristics similar to my own assessed scores.   However, within each profile category (Communication Anxiety-Low, Verbal Aggressiveness-Moderate, and Listening Style-People Oriented), there was some variation in the scoring.         ...

            An individual’s communication style and effectiveness are highly influenced by culture.   Culture is usually unconscious to the individual and is difficult to define for most (Vuckovic, 2008).   Culture includes surface characteristics (appearance and food) and deep-rooted characteristics (communication patterns and child-rearing expectations) (O’Hair, Wiemann, Mullin, & Teven, 2015).   A communication barrier can occur when cultural values and expectations are not similar between communicators.   Personally, I have experienced the barrier culture can have on communication when partnering with individuals that are vastly different from myself.   When I became an early childhood educator, I developed an awareness of this barrier as I needed to communicate with diverse populations of families on a university campus.             I a...