January Blog Post

This month's content led me to perceive the communication process through a different lens, one in which emphasizes collectiveness, collaboration, community, awareness, and consciousness, as key elements. The communication process is so familiar, comfortable, and natural in simply every aspect of our lives that we forget how important and essential it is to creating our reality. We are all familiar with being unconscious momentarily with what comes out of my mouth in that it seems so difficult to be fully aware all the time. We get caught into disagreements, difficulty forming our ideas, and exhaustion at times with the amount of effort communication requires. Among this, studying the communication process allows us to more easily navigate through these struggles, to formulate self-awareness in a manner that allows easier communication flow, and to better appreciate the meaning behind the simple interactions of our day to day.

Self-awareness is something that I have chosen to place more focus on in my life as I have come to realize that it helps bring clarification and intuition that we often need to grow, to learn, and to interact better with those around us. It is one of those things that requires consciousness, self-reflection, openness, honesty, and a willing to learn and to change. I feel that one of the biggest hindering's to global change or any type of change is a lack of self-awareness. When we don't chose to look inside ourselves to understand how we are affecting our surroundings, our interactions, our reality, we find others to blame, which ultimately allows no actual control over anything because the only control we have is over ourselves. I have found that the only control, or power, that I can put out into the world every day is my actions and I must take responsibility for what comes of that.

It gives you a lot of power when you begin to live your life in this way, because it makes you feel that you really can do a lot with your decisions. If we each chose to be a little more self-aware, we might be able to listen and learn from each other in a much more harmonious way. Another aspect of communication that has taken control of my life is believing that each person is a value to my life, to teach me something, or to provide me with something to utilize my self-growth. There are so many experiences and opportunities to learn from one another if we understand that we are here to help each other learn. If we chose to understand each interaction in this way, we might be able to have breakthroughs or awakening moments of growth and expansion. It is a connect-the-dots, understand meaning behind our communications, and choice to utilize each circumstance in some type of way.  The statement I chose to utilize surrounding the communication process is, "When we listen to learn from the other, we are presented with an opportunity for discovery that is always grounded in the different perspectives, values, and cultural locations of the other" (Warren et al, 2015, p 77). This statement is so powerful if you can chose to allow it to take meaning in your life. This is where we can experience such amazing growth and development on a personal level, collective level, or even global level. At the least, it makes you more reflective and meaningful in what you put out into the world.