What's My Directionality?

    Recently, all of the students in the Honors Mentorship Program took a survey about what our communication styles are and how it affects the way we interact with others. The results of my survey told me that I am considered Spirited. Being spirited means that I am not only opinionated, but I am also persuasive, it also means that I am very animated in my speech and use a lot of movements when it comes to my body language. In the packet that we received talking about the different styles, it covered all four of the different kinds. Using this packet, we learned how to communicate with others who may not share our communication techniques. For example, if I wanted to communicate with someone who is Direct, I would need to just get straight to the point of what I want to talk to them about and make sure that I maintain eye contact and act sure of what I’m saying. Learning how to talk to people with different styles will help me to be a great leader. When I am talking to a huge group, I could use aspects from all the different styles. Also, to be a leader, you have to be able to understand why people react the way they do to things you say, and how you can reword it to make it easier for them to understand. When it comes to my style, however, there are disadvantages. I may generalize when talking about something or gloss over details that I feel aren’t important but are important to whoever I am communicating with. I may also be overdramatic and respond negatively to criticism that could be beneficial to me in the end.
     Last week, all of the students went to a church near our districts and met up for a Lapdog Retreat. I believe this retreat brought us all together but also helped us apply everything we learned from our directionality results. We broke up into groups and took part in multiple activities. I believe the most important activity was this one where we laid dots on the floor and basically played “don’t step on the lava”. After each round, we would take away 3 dots and move 1. We set a goal in the beginning to get it down to 15 dots. In this activity, we all had to work together, get close, and share ideas about how we were going to reach our common goal. This was really fun because we got to hear how everyone else thinks, and we all worked together and finally reached our goal!

     When it comes to trusting myself, I have a hard time sometimes. I feel like I can achieve whatever I want, but when the time comes, I may psych myself out and feel like I can’t. However, I also have a hard time trusting others. When I open up about myself I worry that the person I am talking to might judge me, or twist my words and cause me problems. Once someone has my trust, they have it forever; if they break that trust, then it’s really hard to get it back. But I think it’s harder to be the person who is being trusted. When someone enlists their trust on you, it is a very important thing to fight to keep. If you let that person down, you could cause problems for them or they may decide that you aren’t the person they thought you were and it can result in a conflict. Also, sometimes you feel like someone has told you something that you feel you shouldn’t keep to yourself and then you have to decide if giving up their trust is worth it or not, which is a stressful situation.