What Is Interpersonal Perception?

Series Summary

Effective communication skills are essential for building and maintaining successful relationships with family and coworkers. These skills are also key to managing new environments, people and situations. Interpersonal communication can be verbal or non-verbal, direct or passive, and involves both one-to-many and one-to-one interactions. Improving interpersonal perception builds communications skills and can provide relationship help. Discover how to set aside personal bias and test perceptions before making initial perceptions. Capture tips for using observation to reduce uncertainty and learn to verify perceptions with direct communication.

Video Transcript

"Hi there, I'm Tracy Goodwin and I'm the red sweater lady and today we're going to be talking about; how to improve perception. Well how to improve perception of what? Well people, places, things, ideas. What is perception? Perception is how you think and feel about things, people, places, ideas and in order to be a successful interpersonal communicator which is what we all strive for, we have to learn to improve our perception. Perception can get in the way of our communication. It can get in the way of our relationships. With loved ones, with husbands and wives, with co-workers, with bosses, with everybody that we come in to, in to contact with. Some people will tell you right away that they have really good perception. They can really, they're really right about people when they first meet them and other people will say, oh I have terrible perception, I mean I always judge people wrong. Well there's actually some things that you can do, some things that you can be aware of to help you improve your perception which will then in turn improve your interpersonal relationships."