My Relationship With My Brother

1368 Words3 Pages

It’s been said, “you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family” this quote is so true when it comes to family relationships you can’t choose them but you’re stuck with them for life. Things can often get tough and when family relationships get tense it can only make life a lot more difficult than what is necessary. My communication goal is to better improve my current relationship with my teenage brother, we have both have not been getting along lately as well as I would like (teenagers and their mood swings…) and I want to change that in a more effective way by using the skills I learned in interpersonal speech. In this paper I tried to complete my goal of improving and maintaing a solid relationship with my brother I applied perception checking, listening, and self-disclosure to better communicate and understand my brother. I used the concepts of self-disclosure, perception checking and responsive listening because those three concepts applied the closest to each situation. With each one I felt that I understood how exactly to communicate using them and that they fit in well with what was going on between my brother and I. The first concept I used was responsive listening, responsive listening is giving your complete undivided attention, while letting the other person get a chance to speak freely and openly, while the person listening provides only small interjections and nonverbal listening cues while sometimes paraphrasing to show that you have fully been aware. I choose this concept because I felt like sometimes I dominate the conversation with my brother and I decided to just give him complete undivided attention and a chance to talk. I was picking up my brother from school, and from the start he seemed to be... ... middle of paper ... ...lem or situation with anyone that needs to be dealt with I won’t just let things go I will address the situation, without coming off rude but also keeping it very unbiased and neutral so whoever I 'm dealing with will feel comfortable to communicate back in effective manner as well. I communicated more effectively using the communication concepts of perception checking, responsive listening, and self-disclosure to more pleasantly get information and details to help my brother and I’s rocky relationship. No longer do we fight for no reason because now I have taught him some of the skills for communication and he actually has been usuing them to his advantage as well. I learned that being an effective communicator can make a huge difference no longer do I need to walk on egg shells when you can comfront a situation quickly and then it’s resolved and you can move on.

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