Week 8

General Psychology
CHAPTER NINE
INTRAPERSONAL AND INTERPERSONAL SKILLS

By: Manaye Adela (Lecturer)

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 CHAPTER NINE
INTRAPERSONAL AND INTERPERSONAL SKILLS
Objectives:
At the end of the chapter, you are expected to:
Define self-concept, self-awareness, self-esteem, and self-confidence
and illustrate with real life examples;
Describe features of emotional intelligence and anger management
and demonstrate with examples from your experience;
Explain resilience and coping with stress by taking different stressors
as an example;
Explain critical and creative thinking, problem solving and
decision making by taking hypothetical/real life stories

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 9.1. Self-concept and Self-awareness
A.Self-concept
The self is a reflexive phenomenon that develops in social interaction and is
based on the social character of human language.
B. Self- awareness
· Self-awareness is having a clear perception of your personality, including
strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, beliefs, motivation, and emotions. It is an
attribute of one‘s self-concept that allows understanding other people‘s
attitudes and responses to them.

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Here are some suggestions to start building self-awareness:
· Practice mindfulness
· Become a good listener
· Become more self-aware
· Open your mind to new perspectives
· Develop self-esteem
· Look at yourself objectively
· Take feedback from others
· Know your strengths and weaknesses
· Set intentions and goals

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 9.2. Self-esteem and Self-confidence
A. Self-esteem
· "Esteem" is derived from the Latin aestimare, meaning "to appraise,
value, rate, weigh, estimate," and self-esteem is our cognitive and, above
all, emotional appraisal of our own worth.
B. Self-confidence
· The term confidence comes from the Latin fidere, "to trust."
· To be self-confident is to trust in oneself, and, in particular, in one‘s ability
or aptitude to engage successfully or at least adequately with the world.
· A self-confident person is ready to rise to new challenges, seize
opportunities, deal with difficult situations, and take responsibility if and
when things go wrong.

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 9.3. Self Control
· Self-control is achieved by refraining from actions we like and
instead performing actions we prefer not to do as a means of
achieving a long-term goal.

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 9.4. Anger Management
· Anger is a state of emotion where a person is irritated by block of interests, loss of
possession or threats to personality.
The techniques for managing anger:
· Recognize anger as a signal of vulnerability - you feel devalued in some way.
· When angry, think or do something that will make
you feel more valuable, i.e., worthy of appreciation.
· Do not trust your judgment when angry.
· Anger magnifies and amplifies only the negative aspects of an issue, distorting
realistic appraisal.
· Try to see the complexity of the issue.

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 Anger…
· Anger requires narrow and rigid focus that ignores or oversimplifies context.
· Strive to understand other people's perspectives.
· When angry you assume the worst or outright demonize the object of your anger.
· Do not justify your anger. Instead, consider whether it will help you act in your
long-term best interest.
· Know your physical and mental resources.
· Anger is more likely to occur when tired, hungry, sick, confused, anxious,
preoccupied, distracted, or overwhelmed.
· Focus on improving and repairing rather than blaming. It's hard to stay angry
without blaming and it's harder to blame when focused on repairing and
improving.
· When angry, remember your deepest values.
· Anger is about devaluing others, which is probably inconsistent with your deepest
values.
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 9.5. Emotional Intelligence and Managing Emotion
· Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to identify and manage
one‘s own emotions, as well as the emotions of others.
· Emotional intelligence includes at least three skills:
· emotional awareness, or the ability to identify and name one‘s own
emotions;
· the ability to harness those emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking
and problem solving;
· and the ability to manage emotions

· Emotional intelligence describes the ability, capacity, skill, or

self-perceived ability to identify, assess, and manage the
emotions of one’s self, of others, and of groups.

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 9.6. Stress, Coping with Stress and Resilience
· Stress is a very common condition.
· You feel your heart racing, palms sweating, and stomach growling when you are
under stress, perhaps due to an upcoming job interview or a huge occasion such
as a wedding.
· You also feel it when you are overburdened with work; when you go through a
crisis, or when you face your sources of fear like an angry dog or a plane flight.
· Stress generally refers to two things: the psychological perception of pressure,
on the one hand, and the body's response to it, on the other, which involves
multiple systems from metabolism to muscles
and memory.

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Three categories of stressors: catastrophes, significant life changes, and daily
hassles.
· Catastrophes - Catastrophes are unpredictable, large scale events, such as
war and natural disasters, that nearly everyone appraises as threatening.
· Significant Life Changes - the death of a loved one, loss of a job, leaving
home, marriage, divorce, etc. Life transitions and insecurities are often keenly
felt during young adulthood.
· Daily life events

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 Coping with stress
There are two ways of dealing with stress: problem focused
and emotion-focused.
· Problem focused - when we feel a sense of control over a situation
and think we can change the circumstances or change ourselves, we
may address stressors directly, with problem-focused coping.
· Emotion-focused - When we cannot handle the problem or believe
that we cannot change a situation, we may turn to emotion-focused
coping.

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 Resilience
· Resilience is succeeding in the face of the adversity.
· Resilience is about getting through pain and disappointment without
letting them crush your spirit. In other language, resilience is the quality
to come back at least as strong as before after being knocked down by
adversity.

· Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity,

trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress such as family
and relationship problems, serious health problems or workplace and
financial stressors. It means "bouncing back" from difficult
experiences.

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 9.7. Critical and Creative Thinking
· Critical thinking is also regarded as intellectually engaged,
skillful, and responsible thinking that facilitates good judgment
because it requires the application of assumptions,
knowledge, competence, and the ability to challenge one's
own thinking.
· Critical thinking requires the use of self-correction and
monitoring to judge the rationality of thinking as well as
reflexivity.
· When using critical thinking, individuals step back and reflect
on the quality of that thinking (ADEA).

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·Critical thinking is seen as analytic. It is the
means for arriving at judgments within a given
framework or context.
·Creative thinking, on the other hand, is seen
as imaginative, constructive, and generative.

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 Critical Thinking Creative Thinking
· Analytical · Generative
· Convergent · Divergent
· Vertical · Lateral
· Probability · Possibility
· Judgment · Suspended Judgment
· Hypothesis Testing · Hypothesis forming
· Objective · Subjective
· Answer · An answer
· Closed · Open-ended
· Linear · Associative
· Reasoning · Speculative
· Logical · Intuition
· Yes but · Yes and

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 9.8. Problem Solving and Decision-Making
· Problem solving
· Problems are a central part of human life and it is almost
impossible to avoid it.
· Most of us have problems that have been posed to us (e.g.,
assignments from your teacher).
· There are two classes of problems: those that are considered
well defined and others that are considered ill defined.

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Steps in problem solving ...

1. Recognize or identify the problem.

2. Define and represent the problem mentally.

3. Develop a solution strategy alternatives and select the best one.

4. Organize knowledge about the problem and avail the necessary resources.

5. Allocate mental and physical resources for solving the problem.

6. Monitor his or her progress toward the goal.

7. Evaluate the solution for accuracy.

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 Decision making
· Decision-making is a selection process where one of two or more possible
solutions is chosen to reach a desired goal.
· The steps in both problem solving and decision-making are quite similar.
· In fact, the terms are sometimes used interchangeably.

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 Exercise
1. What is self esteem?
2. Explain the difference between critical thinking and creative thinking
3. What are the causes of stress?
4. Mention stress coping mechanisms

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THE END OF CHAPTER 9

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