Personal Ethical Communication Statement
Having a strong character, I also have a predisposition to optimism that influences positively my communication. I use these personality characteristics to encourage others, but I have realized that my communication needs to be improved due to societal roles that affect my perceptions. Since the world is made up of different categories of people, cultures, and races with which I have to interact, I have the obligation to watch how my perceptions are formed and influenced.
I always believe that the success is the fruit of a hard work or a higher education as a dominant perception; but when reading the text book “Human Communication in society, I have discovered that the opposite site should be taken into consideration. Focusing on hard work and education was blocking my sight to see what others people are trying. As inference, I thought that some people are living in poverty because they did not go to school or did not want to work hard.
This is a wrong inference which I have decided to reject. I recognize that some people did not have the opportunity to go to school despite their willingness to do so. Being from Africa and black, I used to think that due to racial discrimination, the United States would never be led by a black person. The opposite side of my thoughts was proven since president Obama was elected in 2008. That thought was based on my individual experience and the historical time period that showed that among 43 presidents who led the U. S since it has been a country, there was no African American person. This has helped me understand that it is not a good idea to rely on experience or time period. Personally, I realized that I have been experiencing ethnocentrism to some degree because I thought that only my culture was giving more importance to marriage; and all other groups were negligent in the matter. Also, I was stereotyping a group of people according to what I heard about them that most of them were thieves or liars.
This has led me to experience prejudice to one of my co-workers who belonged to that specific group. It affected our communication because I could not trust her or believe in what she could say. As a mother, I thought that I knew better than my children so that I could choose for them the kind and colors of their clothes, their fields of studies, their food and so on. To improve my communication with my children, I have decided to discuss with them about everything before letting them making their own choices.
