Personal Strategies for Improving Human Relations

In order to develop effective human relation skills, we first need to develop the necessary skills that enable us to understand ourselves better.  Our human relation skills enable us to work and communicate effectively with other people.  There are personal strategies to help us achieve awareness, knowledge, and relationship skills to improve our human relation skills.  These strategies include constructive self-disclosure, emotional balance, positive energy, professional presence, team building, and resolving conflict.  Gaining a better understanding of these will give me the opportunity to improve my human relation skills in both my personal and professional relationships.  Knowing ourselves is the key to human relations and the ability to work together effectively in both personal and professional relationships.  I will address how understanding these strategies will enhance my personal and professional life, and how achieving self-disclosure and emotional balance will improve my human relation skills.

Constructive Self-Disclosure

Self-disclosure is the process of letting others know what you think, how you feel, and what you want, which can improve interpersonal communication as well as help strengthen relationships (Reece, 2014, p. 164).  Letting people know how you really feel can help decrease the stress.  I am someone who has a tendency to hold everything in and not say what I truly think or feel because I am fearful of offending someone.  I am aware that I do this, and this class has encouraged me to examine this and realize the stress that it causes me.  I am trying to work on being more open with my coworkers, as well as my husband, with my feelings.  I have been working on constructive criticism as well as self-disclosure in both my personal and professional life.  By holding everything in, my stress level increases, and I become angry and frustrated, and I need to learn to be more assertive and address issues as they happen.  

Emotional Balance

Due to the inability to communicate effectively with coworkers at times, I have experienced feelings of anger, resentment, and frustration, which I feel has made me emotionally unbalanced.  I am very passionate about my work, and when things don’t go well, I take it very personally.  Due to my difficulty with self-disclosure, my stress level increases which in turn causes these feelings of anger and frustration.  I recently took advice from a coworker that suggested that if I have no control over a situation, that I need to let it go.  When I complete a project that has not gone well, I look at the entire project to see if I would have done something differently, would the project had a better outcome.  I am finding that if a project I am involved in doesn’t go like I had planned; it had to do with things for which I had no control over.