Interpersonal Com Blog 9

I feel like this blog will be a lot of babbling so in advance, I apologize. My group and I were tasked with the challenge of creating an invention or service and pitching this idea/service to both my professor and classmates! We were really excited until we realized we didn’t have an idea… We had a hard time figuring out what we wanted to do for our Group Sales Project. I had major creatively block that even a shower couldn’t fix. (That’s really rare for me.) My group and I switched our ideas almost every time we met. When we were shooting off ideas no one would really say anything, but there were always nonverbal cues like becoming silent, avoiding eye contact, etc. Which is typical when you do not want to hurt people’s feelings. A lot of the “But” statements were used during those talks and compliment sandwiches too. “I really like your idea, but I don’t think that it’s right for this project” or “That’s creative! I don’t really think it will reach the student audience though. But you’re awesome with coming up with ideas!” I think the group problem solving really did make us all become closer. We all interact with one another better than we did before. It was not because we were getting along that we couldn’t come to an agreement about what to use as our invention, it was more that we all had ideas that we felt were number one and none of us were seeing it in each other’s ideas. Then we hit the creativity road block because all the ideas we had thought of previously were shot down. We did finally reach a decision though. We ended up taking two of the ideas and created one thing out of a combination of the two. Goooo compromise! (There’s a cheerleading movie on right now while I’m writing this blog.) It was pretty amazing how fast we gave everybody jobs to start working after we finally had an idea. Justin just started handing them out. Justin is doing the infomercial speech in the beginning and Erik will be acting along with him as he is talking to our audience. Allie is in charge of the costumer reviews. I am in charge of the name of the product, (Which I’m calling Freewrite) the overall design of the product, and the design of the product’s logo. I feel like my role in this is kinda small because I will not be physically doing anything during the presentation, but I do think that Justin and Erik are better suited for the talking and acting parts. Allie and I are more shy so this is probably better. We are utilizing our strengths as a group which is super important. They said I am more artistically inclined so they wanted to use that skill. I really hope that this goes well today and that there are no awkward silences. Hopefully we can keep up the energy till the end. We watched infomercials just to look at how they structure their sales pitches. I have to give it to the people who do those. They are pretty hard to do! You only have 30 minutes or the shortened ones are as low as 30 seconds to impress your viewer and get them to buy your product. It’s as nerve racking as en elevator pitch for a movie or a screen play. Definitely an underestimated art.