Communication Evaluations

This week, one of our assignments was to evaluate ourselves on how we listen, how verbally aggressive our communications are, and how comfortable we are communicating. I asked my husband and a colleague at work to evaluate me too...and this is what I found out. 

1. I appear to my colleague to be very confident in all of my communications, which really surprises me because he has heard me say many times that I have an idea but I am not able to articulate it well. He has also heard me express anxiety about a presentation that I was doing at a national meeting. I guess he was more focused on the outcomes (I eventually get my point across and I did really well on my presentation at the meeting) than he was on how I was feeling about it. The truth is that I communicate a lot (I am an extrovert) but I sometimes worry about what I have said.
2. I appear to my husband to be more concerned about speaking to large groups than I do small gatherings. This surprised me because I LOVE to train and present to groups, and large groups don't usually bother me at all (okay...with the exception of the presentation at the meeting). It's the small groups that bother me more, but not when it's small groups of friends and family, which is the context that he sees me in.
3. My husband, my colleague, and I all agree that I am people-oriented listener, and that doesn't surprise me at all. I care a lot about other people and how they are feeling, and I could totally relate to part about having difficulty with judgment because of being over trusting. All in all the three evaluations were pretty close.

The first insight I gained from this is that I like the kind of communicator that I turned out to be. If I heard someone describing me as "a people oriented listener, who is usually comfortable in her communications, and is respectful but firm when interacting with others" that would be okay with me!  The second insight is that I don't have an unrealistic idea of the type of communicator that I am, and it makes me glad to know that my efforts to be a good communicator are evident to others.

The one thing that I notice is that my communication begins to suffer when I let my emotions get too involved, and although I am pleased with the general outcome of these assessments, that is one area I'd really like to work on. In my personal work, I can use the information from the assessments to assure myself that I am on the right path to becoming a competent  communicator, while remembering to keep my emotions in check.