Sections
Skill 1: State Awareness
Your state is your energy. It is your mood, emotions and nervous system. For example: If you’re pissed off, then your body is tense, your breath is up in your chest and neck region, your blood is hot, your endocrine system is producing adrenaline, your mood is hot with anger and perhaps aggressive, and your focus is on how some sort of injustice was done to you. If you attempt to communicate in this state, you will get a bad outcome. It will be a fight. It will eventually drain you and the other person and probably move you away from resolution.
To be both aware of your state and able to shift it, you must connect with your body.
In order to become very skilled in communication, you must first and foremost be aware of your state. If it isn't one that you would want to converse with in another person, then you must tend to it before you participate in the conversation. Remember your intention for solution and peace? Your state has to support your intention.
*you may enter a conversation with a solid state, but then you’re triggered back into a crappy state again. The below suggestions apply here as well.
Tools to shift your state when needed:
Tend to your body. Whether its before or during a conversation, take a mini moment to take a deeper breath in, and a longer breath out. If you need longer, take the time. Go work out, take a walk, confide in a friend, take a nap, a shower - whatever you need.
Consider what is triggering you enough to impact your state negatively. Then ask yourself:
Is whatever you are telling yourself about what went down, what the other person is thinking, or what might happen in the future actually true?
Is it possible that you don't have all the facts?
Is it possible you are envisioning the worst case scenario, or seeing things or the other person's intention as worse than they really are?
Skill 2: Listening
To truly listen to someone openness, while reserving judgment is one of the largest acts of generosity we could bestow. Since generosity is a main tenet of healthy relationship, then it is only natural that we bring it into our conversations. Because we all fundamentally crave being understood, when we enter a conversation, our primary concern is to make sure we are understood. Especially if you are a teacher of any variety, someone who gives public speeches or pitches, a coach, a therapist or a parent who has to teach her child, your goal is to make sure you are as articulate as possible so that your message and POV gets across to your ‘audience’. Although these are all forms of communication, they are not really conversations. What would happen if instead of our #1 priority being to be heard and understood, it was to be able to understand? The game would change.
“Listen to understand, not to reply”.
—Stephen Covey
Listening is about openness. You first have to be open in order to listen and receive another's experience. The opposite, therefore, is being closed. Closed and skilled communicator do not go together.
Full body listening is presence. It’s listening without making it about ourselves, or strategizing a rebuttal. It’s listening for both the context and the subtext. Full body listening is a mediative process: It’s bringing our focus whole heartedly to what another person is trying to convey to us with the intention to understand, rather than strategizing how we might be better understood.
As an active listener, your attitude must be of: “how can I help?” not “listen to me.”
Much easier said than done when if you what you are listening to sounds like BS and is coming out of the mouth of someone you are in a relationship with - no matter what kind of relationship it is. That’s why it’s a practice and when you practice it, it will often not work out as planned. That's ok. Because within a single conversation, you can keep breathing and coming back to the present moment.
Tools for better listening:
BREATHE. The only way out of our heads and back into the moment is through a deeper fuller breath.
OPENNESS: Be willing to be open to a view point thats not your own, especially when you are very attached to your perspective.
CURIOSITY: Ask questions that will help you understand more. As much as we would prefer someone to explain their point perfectly fluently, That's not how it usually goes. Ask questions for clarification.
IMAGINE actually being the other person. This is how we develop empathy when we need it the most and empathy is what we need to build compassion and compassion and empathy lead to understanding.
*more on this plus actual scripts under sections: “Combat” and “The Tools”
Skill 2: Listening
To truly listen to someone openness, while reserving judgment is one of the largest acts of generosity we could bestow. Since generosity is a main tenet of healthy relationship, then it is only natural that we bring it into our conversations. Because we all fundamentally crave being understood, when we enter a conversation, our primary concern is to make sure we are understood. Especially if you are a teacher of any variety, someone who gives public speeches or pitches, a coach, a therapist or a parent who has to teach her child, your goal is to make sure you are as articulate as possible so that your message and POV gets across to your ‘audience’. Although these are all forms of communication, they are not really conversations. What would happen if instead of our #1 priority being to be heard and understood, it was to be able to understand? The game would change.
“Listen to understand, not to reply”.
—Stephen Covey
Listening is about openness. You first have to be open in order to listen and receive another's experience. The opposite, therefore, is being closed. Closed and skilled communicator do not go together.
Full body listening is presence. It’s listening without making it about ourselves, or strategizing a rebuttal. It’s listening for both the context and the subtext. Full body listening is a mediative process: It’s bringing our focus whole heartedly to what another person is trying to convey to us with the intention to understand, rather than strategizing how we might be better understood.
As an active listener, your attitude must be of: “how can I help?” not “listen to me.”
Much easier said than done when if you what you are listening to sounds like BS and is coming out of the mouth of someone you are in a relationship with - no matter what kind of relationship it is. That’s why it’s a practice and when you practice it, it will often not work out as planned. That's ok. Because within a single conversation, you can keep breathing and coming back to the present moment.
Tools for better listening:
BREATHE. The only way out of our heads and back into the moment is through a deeper fuller breath.
OPENNESS: Be willing to be open to a view point thats not your own, especially when you are very attached to your perspective.
CURIOSITY: Ask questions that will help you understand more. As much as we would prefer someone to explain their point perfectly fluently, That's not how it usually goes. Ask questions for clarification.
IMAGINE actually being the other person. This is how we develop empathy when we need it the most and empathy is what we need to build compassion and compassion and empathy lead to understanding.
*more on this plus actual scripts under sections: “Combat” and “The Tools”
Skill 3: Honesty and Vulnerability
When we feel scared or emotionally threatened, we stop being honest with ourselves and with others in an attempt to protect ourselves from hurt and pain. Intimacy is scary, and everyone fears it on some level even though there's a spectrum. The fear of intimacy is the fear of vulnerability. It is: If I say what I truly feel (honesty) instead of projecting, deflecting, and protecting myself, then I may not be enough. And then you might try to change me, or you’ll leave me, or worse - you’ll stop loving me.
It’s hard enough to face the truth of our feelings to ourselves, let alone share them. To feel vulnerable is to feel uncertain and naked - stripped of all thats left of the protection around our subconscious and conscious fears, worries, and doubts. Feelings are not always rational and not always fair. They just are. Some of us weren’t even taught it was OK to have them but instead were unwittingly taught to deny them. If this is the case for you, your feelings might be so scary that you can’t admit them to yourself. If this is the case, I recommend two things: the first is the book “Letting go” By David Hawkins, and the second is to consider one or more of the following: a therapist, a body worker who has experience with stored feelings such as Reiki, breath work with a trained teacher, yoga.
Feelings are not:
Your opinion. For example, when you begin a sentence with “I feel” you are not necessarily sharing your feelings. “I feel that you didn't ______” is not vulnerability. It’s just putting “I feel” at the start of a sentence.
Anyone else’s responsibility but your own. It is absolutely essential to be accountable for your feelings but that does not mean that you do not deserve nor need compassion from a loved one when you share them.
Feelings are:
Initially involuntary. It’s one thing to get stuck in a negative emotional “state” i.e.: usually sad, pissed, angry etc. But when we get a hit of a feeling - it just happens.
Part of our physiology. They are meant to be like water, coming, going, undulating. They don’t want to get stuck or repressed left to calcify in our jaws, necks and bellies. They are meant to be felt like a wave, and then released.
Real. But they’re not always rational.
We cannot feel our feelings nor express them courageously if we don't connect with our bodies.
How to be vulnerable and accountable for your feelings as well as get what you need:
“I know this may not make sense to you, but I’m having all these sensations like pressure in my chest and it’s hard to think and breathe. I feel sad that you _____”
“I’m feeling overwhelmed, and I just appreciate it so much that you are willing to simply listen to me. Your attention right now means so much to me.”
“I’m scared. I know it may not be rational, and I know you’re not responsible, but I am. I feel it in my jaw and my chest. I’m feeling really uncertain about things and I need some reassurance…”
“I feel really angry right now and I know its because of fear. I need to take a time out to cool down and so I can speak to you from a more honest and open place.”
“I’m not sure what I’m feeling which means I must be overwhelmed. I need a moment to connect to myself and breathe.”
How to respond to another’s feelings, especially when he/she is NOT expressing them vulnerably or responsibly:
“I see you’re angry, but I can’t be present for you when you raise your voice. Can you please speak more softly and slowly so I can listen?”
“I’m so sorry for hurting your feelings.”
“Ok, I hear you.”
“Thank you for sharing that with me - l know it’s not easy for you but it means so much to me that you tried.”
Skill 4: Accountability
In order to master the art of communicating, we have to not only be responsible for our feelings and their expression, but we must also be accountable for our perceptions. There is no objective reality. There is yours, and there is the person(s) with whom you speak to.
This is where accountability and awareness intersect. We all have a filter, or lens, through which we see the world and everything and everyone in it. That lens holds all your past experiences, conditioning, and influences. It is the lens of perception. It is what you see, but more relevant, it is how you see it. Knowing this is awareness. Owning it is accountability.
In skilled communication we are 100 percent accountable for our own experience of an event. This does not mean that because we are responsible, that we don’t actually deserve another’s openness to our experience. This was covered in “listening”. Healthy, productive and highly skilled communication occurs when both people are accountable and willing to see, hear and feel the other's point of view.
This is the dance: “I own that this is my perspective” and “I am willing to look at it from your perspective”.
Accountability diffuses most miscommunication because it send the message that the behavior may be stopped. We can’t break a pattern within ourselves or within our relationship without being accountable.
I will go into this in detail under the section: “Combat”, but please note that even in small, random conversations we need this awareness.
Skill 5: Language
Language has a biochemical effect on our entire psychology and physiology which means that the words we use to describe our experience will determine how we feel.
Our language also has a biochemical effect on another’s nervous system, so the words we use to communicate with someone will largely determine the quality of the conversation.
Because we use words and metaphor to describe our experience of anything, at any given moment, our language isn't only important to our communication with others, it is equally critical to how we speak to ourselves.
Examples:
Let’s say you are mildly stressed, but your habit is to always refer to your stress as: “omg I am SO stressed” or “that was a nightmare” or “I can't deal with this”. Saying these things either out loud or to ourselves will magnify the intensity of stress in our systems. We actually make the stress worse when we describe it as bigger or worse than it is.
Instead say:
“This is a little bit stressful but I can handle it”.
“This is disappointing” (we tend to get stressed when something doesn't go as planned)Imagine you are annoyed with your partner, spouse or friend. Instead of giving language to the mild annoyance, you convince yourself that you’re angry based on what you say. “ugh, I am so pissed at him!” or “I’m really angry at you right now” or “ “You always do that and it really frustrates me!”
Instead say:
“That ticked me off a bit”
“That was a bit annoying”
“I’m mildly irritated”
“I’m a bit annoyed at you” vs. “You always do that and I HATE IT!” - imagine what each one is going to do to this person’s nervous system??When describing a negative event, it’s important not to catastrophize it unless it truly was catastrophic. Saying “that was traumatic” about something that was unfortunate but actually NOT traumatic will create an unnecessary charge of stress hormones that do not match the quality of the event.
Instead say:
“That was hard.”
Describing Positive events:
Even though exaggerating a positive experience is a far better communication tactic than exaggerating negative ones, its still important to be precise with our language so we build and earn trust with others. If we are always describing a good experience as the “best day of my life”, then people won't take us seriously. If something wonderful happened, describe it - why was it wonderful? “I just had a fantastic meal - this is what it was:”
Metaphors:
“black sheep”, “cold feet”, “cold as ice” “love is a battlefield” “life is a struggle”, “shoot for the stars”, “tug of war”, “She’s got baggage”, “can lead a horse to water….”, “hungry as a horse”, “Ducks in a row” “it a circus over here since you left”, “The sky is not the limit, I can only do so much”.
Negative metaphor in communicating with a loved one, such as your partner or spouse:
“You can’t just drop your baggage on me like that!”
“You always put the cart before the horse and that's why you don't get it done”
“You’re acting like a child without his cookie”
“You are cold as ice”
“you’re sinking like a ship”
“our life together is a messy road”
Choose your metaphors accurately and wisely.
INVENTORY
Which skill(s) hit home for you the most? In other words, which ones do you think you need to focus on improving the most?
Describe how you can make improvements to each skill.
It’s impossible to not struggle with vulnerability, even though it is one of the greatest gifts we women have - to be able to connect to ourselves emotionally. How do you struggle with it? Get as detailed as possible here.
What are your language patterns?
Consider a time when you have said to yourself or to someone else: “You never” or “You always”. Write it down. Then ask yourself: “is it really true??”
JOURNAL
Have you tried any of the communication tools and suggestions? Journal about your experiences with them here.