1

Zen Sayer
COMM 2110
Personal Change Project
24 April 2015
Overview
This paper outlines my personal change project. My goal was to change an unwanted
speaking behavior that has often put strain on my interpersonal relationships. I applied strategies
from the text that included thinking about what to say before I said it, using some gestures
instead of words, and putting myself into the position of the other person. I have become much
more aware of my ineffective communication habits because of this project. The effects of
having done this project were only good ones, and I have since already improved significantly,
although there is still a lot more room for improvement. A goal that I have set for myself going
into the future is to be more aware of other people and to know how to respond to them more
efficiently by cutting down on unnecessary information when speaking.
Unwanted Communication Pattern
I have a terrible habit of simply talking too much in times when it is not needed. I tend to
add quite a bit of unnecessary information to my conversations. It has gotten to the point that the
people I speak to often get annoyed with me for taking up more of their time than they wanted,
as well as greatly elaborating on minor details that they had no desire to hear in the first place. I
have noticed myself doing it nearly anywhere I amat work, school, social gatherings, and at
home. At its worst, this bad speaking habit of mine has landed me tension and avoidance from
others, because they are scared that I will talk way too much.
One such occasion occurred at work. My managers are both people who do not have time
for idle chit chat, so they need people to give them the information they need as fast as humanely
possible. I was working at our customer service desk one day when the assistant store manager

2
came up to me, asking me what all of the employees were doing. I went ahead and started
bringing up every little detail about what everyone was doing that I could think of. After nearly
three minutes, the assistant manager raised her hand and stopped me mid-sentence. Her face
obviously expressed annoyance, along with some frustration and anger. She then proceeded to
tell me that she did not need or want to know every single thing all the employees had done or
were doing, but that what she really needed was a simple overview so that she could find projects
for the teammates to do if they were not busy doing anything. When she was finished speaking,
she asked me again what everyone was doing, to which I replied that everyone was keeping busy
with previously assigned tasks. After I was finished re-stating the situation, she turned and
hurriedly walked away, her face grim from having wasted so much time on one small thing.
Another time I ran my mouth on details was when I was at a friends house. We were
talking about a project for a class, and she was wondering what I was doing for the project. Once
the question was out in the open, I kept going on and on about the project, going over practically
every single detail of the topic and how I was going to demonstrate it. After a few minutes, she
started to look angry, so I stopped talking to ask her what was wrong. She told me that it felt like
I was rubbing in her face the fact that I knew all about what I was going to do for my project,
while at that point in time she still had no idea how to even begin. If I had only said less, it would
not have sounded like I was bragging, and I would not have made her angry with me.
In both of these situations, I disregarded the other persons time and feelings, making
them angry or annoyed with me. I did not use effective thinking and speaking strategies to get
my messages across in a short and timely manner. Instead of thinking in the best interests of the
other person, I only thought about myself. I realize that such a selfish way of interacting with
others leads to bad interpersonal relationships.

3
Strategies
When I started on this personal change project, I knew I needed to change my selforiented way of speaking into an other-oriented way of speaking to improve my interpersonal
relationships. I planned to apply strategies from the course text into my conversations, so that I
could start on the road to better communication. I wanted my experiences with others to have
positive results instead of the overwhelmingly negative ones that I was used to.
The first strategy I felt would benefit me would be the process of putting myself into the
position of a task-oriented listener, because they prefer clear and brief messages (Beebe, 2014, p.
124). By putting myself into the position of a task-oriented listener, I could better understand
what it is that I would want to hear if I was the one being spoken to about something. Doing this
would help me to disregard non-essential information from what I choose to speak out loud,
making the other person more pleased by getting across only the essential information that they
had wanted to know. If I had done this in my conversation with my assistant manager, I would
have left her in a good mood because she wouldnt have felt as if she had wasted an
unnecessarily long amount of time talking to me over a simple subject.
Second, I decided to perform an information triage within myself before speaking, so that
I only say useful and wanted information instead of less useful and not wanted information
(Beebe, 2014, p. 140). Quickly performing the information triage within myself would greatly
help me to figure out which information I really do not need to discuss because it is unnecessary,
and instead picking out all of the most important points to get across to the other person. If I had
done this when discussing my project with my friend, I would have saved myself the effort of
talking about minor details that she did not want to hear about, as well as not hurt her feelings by
sounding as if I was bragging because I was going into such detail.

4
Lastly, I felt that using emblems to describe some parts of my messages would help me to
get my point across while not blabbering on about unnecessary information (Beebe, 2014, p.
195). Using emblems would enable me to say less while still getting as much information across
as I felt was necessary. It would please people because I would not needlessly run my mouth, and
instead look more involved by using various gestures to get my points across. If I had used some
emblems to give a better image of my project, my friend would have been happy to know some
of the most important parts of my project, while being able to picture it more because of my use
of emblems.
Constraints
While working on my personal change project, I did run across some situations where I
was not effectively able to perform the strategies that I was using. In one situation, I was
unintentionally rude to a customer at work because I used all emblems instead of speaking. I
needed to find a healthy balance of words and emblems in that situation, which I did not do.
Also, a couple of times conversations and questions came out of nowhere and caught me offguard, making me unable to perform my desired strategies effectively in a time constraint. This
happened to me often in my workplace, when my managers and supervisors suddenly appeared
and asked me things about myself and other employees.
Implementation
To put my strategies to use, I immediately started changing the way I approached
conversations. Speaking with my managers at work became much less terrifying because they no
longer got angry with me for wasting their time. I tried to manage the constraints when I could
by reacting faster to my peers and speeding up my thought process. I cannot recall any changes

5
that I had originally wished to achieve but was not able to, because everything went almost
smoothly for me.
Results
The consequences of my personal change project have been overwhelmingly positive. I
can now mentally put myself into the shoes of a task-oriented listener and give out simple and
clear messages. I can get to the point much faster than I ever could before. Now, the people that I
talk to no longer avoid me because they are afraid that I will continue to talk on and on more
than needed.
The only slightly negative consequence that I have noticed is that quite a few people have
commented on the fact that I have changed. Several people were at first worried about me
because speaking frankly was unlike me. However, since then, everyone has begun to appreciate
my new way of speaking. My plans have turned out exactly as I had hoped based on what I had
read about in the text. I have been nothing but satisfied with the outcome of this project because
it has without a doubt made my interpersonal relationships so much better, and I like not wasting
my breath on unnecessary words.
Recommendations
For the near future, I plan on keeping up the use of the techniques that I used in my
personal change project. Overall, they have worked fairly well for me, and I have already seen a
great improvement in my communication habits since I started using them. Until the time when I
feel comfortable about the amount of information that I talk about, they will continue to help me
when I truly struggle.
Works Cited
Beebe, Beebe & Redmond. (2014). Interpersonal Communication: Relating to Others. 7th Ed.
Boston: Pearson Education / Allyn & Bacon.