COMMUNICATION
Communication is the goal of being able to freely and comfortably express your mind and your say on things. It is learning how to organize your thoughts in a way that makes sense to you and those which you are trying to reach. It also has a lot to do with being able to communicate to different groups and scenarios so that you can do it in a flexible way. Learning how to communicate well with others, weather it be orally, visually or any other possible way you may think of, is a critical part of life. Communication was my weakest area as I started out the year but now I feel that it is the strongest of my skills, well besides anything to do with art.
Not all of my communication skills where horribly bad, I was and am good at communicating in a visual manner through my art but I seldom try to communicate with it. Usually I just paint or draw what I feel like without thinking about the message, and that is why I had problems communicating orally the most. Because with oral communication you really have to take your time and think things all the way through and inevitably you must think of the end effect it will have on an audience. This class helped me see all this and I can now look back and see how much my skills improved.
In the beginning of the year I would say I was okay at communicating through my writing. Yes I was ok but now I am an expert at it, I hope. What revolutionized my skills was all the demanding work and essays as well as journals that I had to write during the course of this year. It is inevitable for your skills to not evolve because it is good that you are forced to participate in such communication exercises as speeches and presentations. One thing that really helps is not going solo right away, it is good to have a group to work with so that you can set your foot down and keep it down without falling over. After that stage I found that it is much easier to communicate to others by your self. All the stomach aches and dizziness go away. During class I did not really go all out and show how much my communication skills improved but outside of main class I was a killer on the floor. I was cruising through in mentored session and in all of my art classes my critiques were untouchable and unsurpassed.
Forbidden knowledge mentor session had a bit more to do with my evolution in my oral skills.. It wasn’t that it was a better class to be in or that I was not comfortable in main class. It was just that it was a much smaller group and our mentor, Teresa, did a great job in making the space feel very welcoming and free. In mentor session you could really say anything about anything and people would hear you and contemplate on it and not jump on you right away, and there was also feed back too. Feed back also helps out with communication skills, cause when you hear or are told that you did a good job it makes it all the better to try harder. Now I can effectively and calmly express what I need to express and know that people know what I am talking about and that they can understand me. Its funny because one of me fears of oral communications for me was that I would always get a sort of weird voice and accent as soon as I started to talk. But through this class I have found my voice and reassurance.
It one thing to talk and state things and it is another to actually show what you mean so I have chosen some examples that show what I am talking about. I have decided to include one of the speeches I wrote for a presentation and one of my observation journals.
The speech is on Susan Bordo and a presentation I had to do on the male body and the double bind of masculinity. It also connected to the media and how it has a lot to do with how we see ourselves and how we grow mature on a sexual level, if we do at all in the correct level. Well is there a correct level. Anyways the speech shows how I am able to compose my thoughts and organize them better so that I may have a good ending. However what happened when I did the presentation was that I broke all the barriers and I let go of the cliché and the ordinary and I went for the path not always traveled.
The path of truth and or accepting that you are sometimes part of the problem. What I said was more like this. The media is us, it is not some hybrid side of society, it is society. And who makes up society, individuals, and what is every person in the world, and individual. So why complain about something that we create ourselves. Sure we could pretend to not be happy with it and feel like we are being controlled. But the truth is we are controlling ourselves because the media gets feed back from us and all the do is just project that back on to us, because that is what we truly deep down want. For example take weight issues in Hollywood and television. All girls are extremely small and anorexic looking, and extremely beautiful. And if you ask someone they’ll say that it is sick and how can someone do that to themselves and then they go home and marble in front of the television wishing that they were like the people on it. Well I am a realist when it comes to life and I can tell you that if I had the chance I would fuck Paris Hilton in a heart beat. So the media just gives me what I want.
The second example is one of my observation journal, we had two so I chose the one concerning the art museum. This journal shows how I grew able to express all the components that I have on thoughts and make them clear so that an audience can see what I am talking about. It was a good exercise because in order to be good it had to have complex components and insightful observation. And just learning how to see those and be able to help other see close to what you can see is a great accomplishment. I really don’t have too much to say about this journal I believe it speaks for itself. So enjoy.