It's ALL your Girlfriend's Fault!!!

Conflict between people is a fact of life and can occur in all level of interactions- between relationship partners, within family and among friends. It is important to manage interpersonal conflict in order to maintain a long lasting and rewarding relationship. However, managing interpersonal conflict is no easy task. Conflict can be productive if it is handled and resolved using effective communication techniques.

This week blog post features an example of interpersonal conflict between both my parents and me. Being the only child in the family, I have experienced different types of interpersonal conflict with my parents.

An example will be their high expectation of me to excel in my studies. Since my secondary school years and up to junior college, I have been excelling both in my academics and extra-curricular activities. Everyone, including my parents, teachers and relatives, thought highly of me and felt that I will become a very successful man in my later years.

However, this reality of becoming a successful man in the future seems to have become a faraway dream ever since I was in NUS. My academic results have been not been up to par to my own expectations if compared to my previous academic results and my passion for extra-curricular activities has slowly dissipated into thin air. The permanent negative slope on my computed CAP score over the three years in NUS really makes me frustrated and depressed at times.

The conflict arose when my parents attributed my deteriorating CAP score to the fact that I have a girlfriend. They think that having a girlfriend during schooling years (this include university) will do more harm than good to my studies. Having a girlfriend (to my parents) can be distracting to my pursuit of knowledge in the university. I have tried to explain to them the various reasons for my deteriorating academic results but they will always assert that it is the “girlfriend” factor that does the damage.

Are there any other better ways to convince my parent that there are other factors that can affect my academic results other than the “girlfriend” factor? How can I convince my parents that having a girlfriend has its own advantages as well?

#1

Image adopted from http://www.sexualhealthcentresaskatoon.ca/par/comm.htm

Have you ever been impressed by someone who can deliver an inspiring speech or presentation? Have you ever wondered what makes them such successful communicators? Do you wish that you could be like them as well? I guess these three questions might have resurfaced in my mind several times; especially when I get to witness an inspiring presentation, be it a seminar, talk or presentations.

So what actually determines the success of a presentation, particularly in an oral presentation? According to a research done by Dr. Robert Merabian from the University of California, he listed three important channels of communication information: Word, tone and body. Word can be defined as the type of language used to convey the message; tone is the sound in speaking and body is the way we look and move when delivering a presentation. He concluded from his research that body has the highest total impact of a spoken language (56%) followed by tone (34%) and word (10%).

Certainly, oral communication skills cannot be mastered in a day or two. They can be improved and polished with every presentation that we make. For myself, I would consider oral communication skills to be my major concern among the other communication skills. In my opinion, having good oral communication skills enables a presenter to convey his/her messages across to the audience in a precise and understandable manner. Furthermore, a major plus point would be to make the presentation “catchy”, meaning that it will be able to attract the attention of the audience from the start of the presentation till the end of it. To be able to achieve this, the presenter must equip him/herself with other communication skills such as non-verbal communication skills and interpersonal communication skills. Certainly, personality and charisma of an individual is important to determine the success of an oral presentation.

Written communication skill is another part of the communication skills that I hope to improve on. As you are reading my blog, you would might think that my postings are not as exciting and intriguing as the others. Often, I will be “stuck” in a situation where I could not continue my writing anymore because I was just unable to articulate and find the right words to put it into my writing. (You will never guess how many times I have struggled with writing this first posting) However, please be assured that I am working hard on making my future blog posts more interesting and exciting to read.

That is all for this first blog post. Thanks for reading.