Encouragement vs Praise

Praise and encouragement are different concepts. Praise is more like an evaluation or a judgement and it can have a negative effect on people. On the other hand, encouragement is to inspire with spirit and hope, it is bringing out more motivation and the other person's succesful sides. In other words, it is telling people to do more what we enjoy receiving and do less the things that they are not succesful. The examples in the below picture help us more to understand the difference between these two concepts and the results of using each one of them.

I also found a very good and meaningful statement about encouragement and praise which describes the importance of motivation by using the encouragement after a failure.

Authority and Power

Being an authority and being in power seems to be same things but these are different things with different uses and consequences. Authority is the right given to a manager to achieve the objectives of the organisation. It is a right to get the things done through others by taking decisions or giving orders to the subordinates to get obedience from them. It is more related to influence the others and persuasions over them. Another intresting thing about to authority is that in an organisation we have two options; we experience the authority or we exercise the authority because of hierarchy.

On the other hand, power is a broader concept than authority with the ability of a person to influence the beliefs and actions of other people. Power can be personal power. A person can get his personal power from his personality or from his knowledge. Power is about to control over the people.

Authority

As we know authority is the legitimate use of power which one person holds over another, but in our course, we approached to this concept with different perspectives by relating the authority to OFNR analyse and we did some exercices by observing the feelings and needs behind the request of the person with authority to find a way to say "no" to authority figures. When we understand the feelings and needs we can develop a strategy to refuse the authority by fulfilling these needs of the person who have the power with another ways and this also let us talk about the different uses of the authority. We watched an intresting video which shows us different uses of the authority while conducting the orchestra.

Another intresting video that i found is about the milgram experiment which shows us how people obey the authority without questioning it.

Empathy

Emphaty is basicly to put yourself in someone else's shoes and to understand people by connecting to what is truely important for these people at that moment and what are their feelings and needs. The main idea behind developing empathy is to build trust and sense care to other person. The wrong use of empathy is trying to manipulate others because it is breaking the trust and communication between people and create a disconnection. There are also some common human behaviours in our communications like advising, educating, consoling, explaning or correcting. These behaviours seems to be an empathy but they are not responding to the real messages in a conversation which are the feelings and needs because we need to observe and understand people's feelings and needs to develop a proper empathy. In the video below, we can see that people in the same place have all different thoughts, feelings and needs.

Effective and Active Listening

Listening plays an important role in proper communications because it's about receiving message and understanding each other. For an effective and active listening, we need to be connected to the speaker and we have some requirements to create this connection; like focusing the speaker by minimising the distractions and making eye contact, paraphrasing what we heard and using body language to give the message that we listened the speaker or responding after waiting and listening all the other person wants to say. The video below is explaining the effective listening concept with some interesting tips to improve the communication skills that we can use also in our buşiness life.

Identifying Observations, Feelings and Needs

In today's class, we have spent the whole three hours doing exercices to identify observations, feelings and needs in our conversations. The observations must based on facts without any evaluations, when evaluations are included they are not anymore expressed clearly and honestly. As an example to differentiation of observations and evaluations, we can say that the phrase "John was angry with me yesterday for no reason" is mixed with evaluation because of the part "no reason" which gives the conversation the sense of exagerration, and it isn't anymore a clear and honest fact. The better phrase for observation could be "John was angry with me yesterday for a reason that i couldn't understand".

Feelings must also be clear in conversations without any effect of other people. As an example, in the phrase "When you don't greet me, i feel neglected" there isn't a clear feeling because being neglected is connected to others but if we say "sad" instead of "neglected" in the same phrase, it is expressing a clear feeling of sadness without any effect of others.

For a proper OFNR (Observation, Feeling, Need, Request) analysis of conversations, needs also must be verbally expressed. A good example that we discussed in class to idenfiy needs was; "I feel angry when you say that, because i am wanting respect and i hear your words as an insult." In this phrase the need which is wanted to be fulfilled is "respect" and the person clearly shows his feeling of anger.

Connecting and Disconnecting Communication Styles

First of all, we can say that people show their feelings to others but they dont show the needs which are the roots of these feelings. This makes the conversations between people without communication, understanding or connection and it let people communicate like robots even without listening each others.

When people face with a negative speech or comment that we call enemy fire in conversations, usually they use some strategies that creates disconnection between them, we can cite these strategies as fight, freeze and flight. In fight strategy, people immediately answer with negative feelings like sadness or fury, in freeze situation, they dont know what to do and in flight strategy, they run away. All of these strategies create a disconnection in communication because people dont observe the facts behind the conversation.

The best way of connecting language can be described as; observation, feelings, needs and requests. The most important thing is to make request after understanding the facts and needs in the conversation.

We can also cite the communication styles as we see in the picture below. Our behaviours and communication styles change according to our focus and concerns, and understanding each other play a big role to create a connecting communication without conflicts.

                       

Humanistic Psychology and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Humanistic psychology focuses basicly on the individual and free will, creativity, spontaneity and personal choice of the the individual. In some part, it relates to human needs because everything we do in every moment of life is serving our needs and we create some strategies to fulfill these needs. 

As an example to needs and strategies, we can say that we are individuals but we are also connected to each other through phones or social media like facebook and twitter. In this example, having a connection or a relation is one of the human universal needs for everybody, and the social media or phones are strategies developed by people to fulfill their need. There are also some natural born needs like food, air, healthcare...etc. As a result of these shared basic needs, it is easier to understand others in our social life.

Maslow's triangle is a categorized and ordered hierarchy of human needs. This  helps us to understand better the humanistic psychology and needs. 

                                   

The triangle shows us the people's basic and complex needs from bottom to top, but today we discussed in class that this isn't an absolute order because the order can change in some higher parts of the triangle with different individual's life expectations but the lower parts are of course definite because these are  clearly the needs of everybody. 

First Blog About Positive Psychology

I am Orkun from Sabancı University in Istanbul, Turkey. I am not a blogger normally but this will be the beginning to my blog because of my "Communication and Conflict Management" course which have the requirement of having a blog for all students. I am not sure about what to do in my blog to be honest because i never wrote or read blogs until now, but i will do my best by writing about the topics we discuss in class by linking these topics to other sources and ideas with my comments.

Today i will write about positive psychology. First of all, psychology is an ancient Greek word which means the discourse or knowledge of the soul. When we talk only about the psychology instead of positive psychology we see that people are ashamed of using this word or going to the psychologist who are treating the mental illness of people. Today's one of the most interesting discussion in our class was this issue. I think that it is normal to go to a psychologist if you are having some mental problems like we go to a doctor when we have an injury, but  most of people have negative intentions on psychology or psychologists. 

On the other hand, positive psychology is a theory which is using techniques to understand the positive, adaptive, creative and emotionally fulfilling aspects of human behavior. I found a video which explain the idea of positive psychology with more details.

An interesting example given by our professor about positive psychology was that different persons who are making pasta with the same ingredients have all different pastas from one to another at the end. If we relate this example to social life, we see that we are all living in a different way and we all have some different aims in our lives. What is matter here is to create a goal and focus in success. It is also related to our business life, when we appeal for a job we have to decide on what we are waiting from that job and than we have to chose our path according to our decision. We can make this decision according to money that we will earn, our qualities or abilities which will create our career or our feelings which will give us a meaningful life and more happiness. This decision reminded me an example from the tv show "How i met your mother". Marshall Eriksen, who is a fictional character studying law to be an environmental lawyer, began his career as a lawyer for a bank and later on he decided to quit for his dream job to pursue his dream of saving the world through environmental law and to make his life more meaningful. We see that positive psychology plays a big role in our decisions which are shaping our social and business life and as a result of this it brings out how much happy we are.