Learning Objectives
Discuss intrapersonal communication.
What do you write when you answer the question, “What are you doing?”? Eating at your favorite restaurant? Working on a slow evening? Reading your favorite book on a Kindle? Preferring the feel of paper to keyboard? Reading by candlelight? In each case, you are communicating what you are doing, but you may not be communicating why or what it means to you. That communication may be internal, but is it only an internal communication process?
Intrapersonal communication can be defined as communication with oneself, including self-talk, acts of imagination and visualization, and even recall and memory (McLean, S., 2005). You read on your cell phone screen that your friends are going to have dinner at your favorite restaurant. What comes to mind? Sights, sounds, and scents? Something special that happened the last time you were there? Do you contemplate joining them? Do you start to work out a plan for getting from your present location to the restaurant? Do you send your friends a text asking if they want company? Until the moment when you hit the “send” button, you are communicating with yourself.
Communications expert Leonard Shedletsky examines intrapersonal communication through the eight basic components of the communication process (i.e., source, receiver, message, channel, feedback, environment, context, and interference) as transactional, but all the interaction occurs within the individual (Sheletsky, L. J., 1989). Perhaps, as you consider leaving your present location and joining your friends at the restaurant, you are aware of all the work in front of you. You may hear your boss’s voice, or perhaps of one of your parents, admonishing you about personal responsibility and duty. On the other hand, you may imagine the friends at the restaurant saying something like, “You deserve some time off!”
While you argue with yourself, Judy Pearson and Paul Nelson would quickly add that intrapersonal communication is your internal monologue and your efforts to plan how to get to the restaurant (Pearson, J., and Nelson, P., 2000). From planning to problem-solving, internal conflict resolution, and evaluations and judgments of self and others, we communicate with ourselves through intrapersonal communication.
All this interaction occurs in the mind without externalization, which relies on previous interaction with the external world. What language would you speak if you had been born in a different country to different parents? What language would you think in? What would you value, what would be important to you, and what would not? Even as you argue to yourself whether the prospect of joining your friends at the restaurant overcomes your need to complete your work, you use language and symbols that were communicated to you. Your language and culture have given you the means to rationalize, act, and answer the question, “What are you doing?” but you are still bound by the expectations of yourself and the others who make up your community.
Key Takeaway
In intrapersonal communication, we communicate with ourselves.
Exercises
Describe what you are doing, pretending you are another person observing yourself. Write your observations down or record them with a voice or video recorder. Discuss the exercise with your classmates.
Think of a time when you have used self-talk—for example, giving yourself “I can do this!” messages when striving to meet a challenge or “What’s the use?” messages when you are discouraged. Did you purposely choose to use self-talk, or did it just happen? Discuss your thoughts with classmates.
Take a few minutes and visualize what you would like your life to be like a year from now or five years from now. Do you think this visualization exercise will influence your actions and decisions in the future? Compare your thoughts with those of your classmates.
McLean, S. (2005). The basics of interpersonal communication. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Pearson, J., & Nelson, P. (2000). An introduction to human communication: Understanding and sharing. Boston, MA: McGraw Hill.
Shedletsky, L. J. (1989). Meaning and mind: An interpersonal approach to human communication. ERIC Clearinghouse on reading and communication skills. Bloomington, IN: ERIC.
This page titled 16.1: Intrapersonal Communication is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Anonymous (LibreTexts Staff), from which source content was edited to the style and standards of the Pressbook platform licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License by Brandi Schur.
