Flight or Fight

 

        In my reading for a class this week I came across a few terms that really caught me off guard. In my life I have heard about flight or fight responses but always thought mainly about animals or how people react to a startling sound or occurrence. Never had I thought about a flight approach or a fight approach in regard to adapting to ones surroundings/environment. These approaches were discussed in a transition model and one of the two I related to while the other makes me nervous to even think about doing.

            Flight approach, is a strategy to cope with a new situation, being hesitant or withdrawn from the new environment (Martin & Nakayama, 2022). Is one approach of the transition model that I can relate to and is how I tend to acclimate myself to a new or uncomfortable situation. While reading about this approach it discusses how these individuals tend to hang back and see how things work before they jump into something. I related to this as in a new situation or while attempting a new skill I tend to watch and get the lay of how things work before I attempt to jump in. This makes me think about how people tend to be afraid to fail and will study and study something before they attempt anything, this can be the same with language or learning a new skill. On the other hand, there is the fight approach.

            The fight approach is a trial-and-error approach to coping with a new situation (Martin & Nakayama, 2022). This approach is one that makes me nervous just to think about but also makes me sort of jealous because I wish I could be more like this sometimes. These individuals don’t mind making mistakes and will try to participate in something without really knowing what they are doing. Even though this is something I wish, at times, I could do these people tend to also annoy me when they mess up by just jumping in when I have worked so hard to complete the task or skill they are just trying to make up or the language they are just throwing out there to try speaking. Overall, I think that a combination of these two approaches would be a better approach when attempting to adapt into a new environment or learning a new language. This approach is called the “flex” approach, which is a combination of productive fight or flight behaviors (Martin & Nakayama, 2022). This is something that I will continue to try to get to as much as I can.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cultural Space

Image
              While reading for a class to obtain my bachelor's degree I came across a chapter discussing cultural space. I never thought much about the space that I inhabit and how it changes. Cultural Space , according to Martin and Nakayama, is the particular configuration of the communication that constructs meanings of various places (Martin & Nakayama, 2022) . One of these spaces is the home in which we grow up in. The home usually stands as a safe, secure place for us to grow, mature, and learn. However, a home can be described in many different ways from a specific address to a particular state or nation. The importance of the home is that it has a particular tie to us as an individual and won’t have the exact same meaning for everyone. In looking at cultural space we also need to realize how it changes. There are several different ways a space can change. In thinking about those changes, it is important to consider...
Read more

Communication Style

Image
  Communication is something that we all do on a daily basis, but do you ever think about your style of communication? According to Martin and Nakayama, communication style is the metamessage that contextualizes how listeners are expected to accept and interpret verbal messages   (Martin, 2022) . There are many different ways someone can differ from you in regard to communication, from being direct or indirect or being elaborate or understated. In completing some reading in an intercultural communication class I gained insight to another way of differentiation communication styles, high-context, and low-context communication. High-context communication is a style of communication in which much of the information is contained in the contexts and nonverbal cues rather than expressed explicitly in words (Martin, 2022) . While on the other hand low-context communication is a style of communication in which much of the information is conveyed in words rather than in nonverbal cu...
Read more