I have both good and bad communication skills. When life is good and not stressful, I practice good interpersonal communication, but when things go wrong my interpersonal communication deteriorates. When things are going well, I practice active listening, which helps me maintain healthy relationships, where I develop a favorable communication climate. When things are stressful, I start shortening the communication process, which leads to a lower self-concept. Once in this cycle, I tend to use more non-verbal communication and incomplete communication based on my perceptions of different situations. During this course I was able to recognize the interpersonal communication traps I fall into in stressful situations and worked on strategies to improve and use my good communication skills when they are truly needed. I will describe how I use good communication to develop a favorable communication climate, how my nonverbal and incomplete verbal communication affects my relationships, and what strategies I can use to maintain healthy interpersonal relationships. The Good By recognizing the fundamental elements of the communication process and addressing them appropriately, I am able to develop a favorable communication climate. The elements “present in all interpersonal interactions: source-recipient, encoding-decoding, messages, channels, noise, context and ethics” (DeVito, 2013, p. 8). If I'm okay, I take the time to recognize these elements and their effects on my communication. DeVito (2013) describes the sender as the person speaking and the recipient as the listener, and tells us that in every interpersonal communication we will act as both speaker and listener. In good moments I can evaluate whether or not a certain topic would be appropriate for certain contexts and how to modify my communication