Ch. 7 Concept: Guidelines for Communicating Emotions

Identify your emotions: What do you feel? Take time to realize what you feel instead of ignoring your emotions. When experiencing more than one emotion, try to identify the primary one, so that you can communicate what is really important.
Choose how to express your emotions: First you have to evaluate your current state. Try not to express your feelings when you are angry or upset because you are not in a clear state of mind when experiencing extreme emotions. Secondly, you need to decide who you want to express your feelings to. Next you need to select an appropriate time to discuss your emotions. And finally you need the appropriate setting, because you shouldn't express feelings of hurt or anger in a public place.
Own your feelings: Owning your feelings is very important to effective communication, because accountable for our emotions.
Monitor your self-talk: We participate in self-talk, which is communicating with ourselves when we feel emotions. We tell ourselves we shouldn't be angry or sad, etc. This affects what happens in our lives.

Fallacies

The book mentions social expectations as a fallacy and that women aren't supposed to express emotions of anger, but I have no problem letting someone know when I'm mad and upset. I have a bigger problem letting someone know when I'm hurt. I don't like when people see me as vulnerable, because I'm always usually really strong and that is what I want other people to see. I'm learning though that it's okay to share all kinds of emotion because it makes everyone understand you better as a person and it feels better to let everything out in the open rather than bottling it up inside. I guess another fallacy that shows up in my interpersonal communication is 'protecting other'. I don't always like saying how I feel because I take the other person's feelings into consideration first and before my own. I know I should take both our feelings into consideration so that I can effectively express my emotions to them. It's just a matter of how I express it.

Perspective on Emotions

I think that the physiological and perceptual influence on emotion makes the most sense because we experience emotion when external stimuli, like a bad grade on a paper or the news of a loved one dying, cause physiological changes in us. External events also don't really have a meaning until we attribute meaning to them. So combining these two perspectives makes the most sense because we feel emotion right away but it depends on how we define these events and how significant they are to us to create the outcome of a certain emotion. Getting a bad grade on a paper might make someone sad, while it makes the other person angry, or they might even feel indifferent. Everyone has different reactions to certain things because they give different meaning to these things. Making racists jokes can be funny to some people but it might really hurt the person that is being made fun of.

Ch.6 Concept: Guidelines to Effective Listening

Be Mindful: Paying your full attention to someone while they talk is mindful, and it is one of the highest compliments you can give to someone while listening by letting them know they matter to us. Mindful listening is the most important principle to being a good listener.
Adapt Listening Appropriately: There are different reasons for listening. It could be that you are listening out of pleasure or for information. You have to listen appropriately and adapt our listening styles to our goals.
Listen Actively: Listening is an active effort, once we know that, we can appreciate it more. To listen actively we need to stay focused, we have to look at others' ideas and feelings and understand them as well as organize them, and retain what a speaker says. By listening and collaboratively and engaging in problem solving we all can become active partners. When we learn that mindful listening is an active process, we can hopefully invest more effort into it.