Evaluating Our Communication Skills

This week we were given the opportunity to take an online quiz, testing our verbal aggressiveness and communication anxiety. We then passed these quizzes along to two friends/family/colleagues to be evaluated by them as well. Here is what I discovered:

I absolutely, positively HATE public speaking. I get extremely nervous when I have to speak in front of others and have had panic attacks that make me faint in the past. Even in small groups with people that I talk to every day, I hate speaking. It makes no sense in my mind and no matter how much I try to convince myself that it's an irrational fear and try to psych myself into thinking that I want to speak and that I will love it...ultimately I freak out. So with that being said, I scored myself very high in the communication anxiety quiz. My husband, who also completed the quiz for me, also scored me high. I think, however, that is because he is aware of my fear. The director of my school, however, scored me in the mild range. She is not aware of my fear of public speaking, so I think that this fact wasn't present to influence her. This just shows that my nervousness does not show when speaking at staff meetings, director conventions, etc. I must do an excellent job of masking my fear!

The second quiz, verbal aggressiveness, I scored at the low end of the moderate range in all three evaluations. I was honest with myself on this, and my husband and director were honest as well. The scores were only one number apart which proves to me that this quiz must be fairly accurate. It also opens my eyes to the fact that I need to work to bring my verbal aggression down into the low range and hopefully, one day, into the none category, as I do not want to ever purposefully disrespect someone.

I think that this was a great exercise for me to partake in and really value the information that I gained from completing it. I hope that others have found this experience to be as eye opening and rewarding.