Description
On the 10th of April 2017 at 10am I, a first year Occupational Therapy student interviewed a participant about her favourite leisure activity which was touch rugby in a semi-formal setting for 10 minutes which took place at City College. The main reason why this interview took place was to help me reflect on my communication skills and to make goals to improve my skills. Due to the participants confidentiality I have made sure that I have used a different name throughout this assignment, the name in which I am going to use is Jane.
In this essay, I am going to refer back to Gibbs model of reflection (Gibbs, 1988) to ensure I have comprehensively evaluated the interview. This will help me to put steps in place to improve my communication skills.
Feeling
In the beginning of the interview I felt nervous because I was thinking about all the things I had to say, such as mentioning about the confidentiality and who I am and what I’m doing. This
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I did this really well as I followed the acronym S.O.L.E.R (as cited in Egan, 1994; O’Toole, 2008). I sat facing Jane at a comfortable distance, displayed an open posture by leaning a little forward, and sustained a soft gaze and used suitable eye contact. This is illustrated as I used direct eye contact whilst Jane was talking and then when I was talking my eye contact was less regular. I also mirrored Jane by sitting the same way and when Jane moved her hands I would move mine. My facial expressions was quite constant throughout the interview. However, when Jane talked about her injury I should have changed my expression to concerning. Vocal tone and speech rate is something I need to develop further as I did not use a variety of vocal tones and my speech rate was not moderate. This is exemplified as when I became nervous the rate of my speech would become