The Importance Of Symbolic Communication

In my day-to-day life I have a tendency to look down when passing people to avoid eye contact or to pull out my phone to avoid making conversation. While using my phone is a form of Symbolic communication which people usually associate with being busy and not available to have a conversation, not making eye contact is a way to avoid conversation to avoid communicating my feelings or communication in general. I think my insecurities have a lot to do with my communication skills. I not only avoid conversations because of insecurities, but also because when I do talk to people it’s all scripted conversation anyway. It’s always less genuine because I never what to hurt anyone’s feelings by disagreeing with them or even by expressing how I truly

Instead of turning my head and pretending to care about something in the other direction I plan to say “hey” and make eye contact with the people I pass. Not only does this seem more inviting and kind, but this would definitely force me to do things I don’t usually do. Making eye contact with people is beneficial, it adds value to any conversation that you have. when you don’t make eye contact it makes you seem weak and uninterested in what the other person is saying. Although my behaviors make me seem less interested, I actually love talking to people and really getting to know them. I don’t want my nonverbal or my confidence issues get in the way of me being myself and showing my true personality. regardless of what I say or what my true intentions are my behaviors tell and entirely different story. I also think it would be better to not use my phone in situations where I feel uncomfortable and where wouldn’t want to talk. Using your phone has kind of became a normal thing in society with people in my age group and we kind of do it naturally sometimes. Instead of always grabbing my phone in situations when I am alone in big group sf people I want to try leaving it at home or keeping it in my bag. I think just like making better eye contact this will make me seem more inviting. Without it in my hand I would seem more open to

Just like my peers reciprocated my nonverbal behaviors that I perceived as negative they also reciprocated the nonverbal behaviors that I see as positive. Instead of being intimidated as I usually am I made sure to look nearly everyone I was talking to in the eyes. Not only did I make more eye contact, but I added a smile to make it less awkward and to not come off too strong. My point to smile in addition to making eye contact resulted in people smiling back at me and some even saying “HI!”. This also led to me having more conversations than I would typically have in my everyday life. I think this change mostly rooted from me being able to see people’s emotions in their eyes which helped me have more empathy with what they were saying. Having empathy with what someone was saying made me more interested in the conversation. Eye contact and good nonverbal behaviors make the people you talk to like you like and care more. This proves true because the people I talked to must have felt that I was more interested because they were more open about their opinions and that made me feel more comfortable to do the same thing. Even though what we were talking about wasn’t really that important it had more meaning than a conversation in which these behaviors were not practiced. Not all times did my eye contact and smiling get the response I hoped for like those instance, but there were times where I ended up having to compensate for