Reflection One -> What I know about Health Humanities

9/7/2023

• Reflection to me is looking back or going over the past. Reflection on my learning is watching the significant academic changes such as grades increasing, papers evolving, and the thrilling excitement to learn.

• What I want to reflect on is what I know about health humanities. To me health humanities are the act of not only medicine but social being. Medicine plays a huge part as it is the solution to most of everyone’s medical stories, however, the social aspect comes into play because that’s (to me) the humanities part. The feelings, emotions such as anger, sadness, defeat, all go into health humanities.

 Reflection Two -> Active Listening

9/13/2023

• Active listening: the conversation of listening. Before yesterday’s class (9/12/2023) I thought I had been doing active listening my entire life. Turns out I had just been having normal conversations where both percipients add to the conversation. Active listening is the object of listening to what can be described as the “speaker.” Acknowledging that you (the “listener”) understands what information is being discussed. However, active listening is not only listening, but asking questions to establish a deeper understanding of the information being spoken of. Later Tuesday night, I got the opportunity to practice active listening with three wonderful individuals: my roommate Sila, my mom, and my friend Griffen.

Each came to me with some sort of topic they had been wanting to discuss and instead of giving advice like my psychology major suggest I do, I sat quietly and listened.  Little head nods then and there, and a couple questions to stretch the conversation a bit. In the end, they felt better than before, and I felt better just knowing I could help. Active listening will only work if the listener is open to giving the speaker their full attention with no interruptions. I am glad I learned more about active listening, because I believe this will be a strong skill to use in my major 🙂