Posts

The scary bits of communication

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How familiar are you with the little voice in your head that increases in volume when you’re about to give a big presentation, meet with a potential client or have a difficult conversation? The volume on that thing can get so loud it throws us off our game. Enter fears and limiting beliefs and their influence on our ability to communicate with confidence, clarity and completeness.

Fears and limiting beliefs are at the root of why we get in our own way, the essence of human versus self conflict, and why we are said to be our own worst critics. They directly show up in how we communicate verbally and non-verbally. They are insidious, nasty creatures that also infiltrate the other elements of conscious communication – emotions, intention, values and preferences and if left unchecked, can take on a life of their own.

What are fears and limiting beliefs?

Fears and limiting beliefs are with most people pretty much all the time. Consider the following:

  • I’m not enough
  • I don’t matter
  • I’m not worthy
  • No one listens to me
  • I’m not smart enough

Do any of these resonate with you? There is NO shame if they do. You are NOT weak and there is NOTHING wrong with you if they do. It’s human to have fears and limiting beliefs – I have them, your boss has them and all the people sitting around you do too. What’s most important is whether you’re conscious of them or not, as well as to what extent you’re aware of how they show up in your life, so you CAN best them.

How fears and limiting beliefs show up in our communication

Let’s illustrate. You’re about to give a presentation to the board of directors of your organization, but you have the fear/limiting belief of “I’m not smart enough” running in the background. Left unchecked, how will this show up in your presentation? Despite rehearsing and preparing ad nauseum, you trip over your words, break into a visible sweat and lose the confidence in your body language and voice intonation when asked questions as you constantly worry about whether you’re coming across “smart enough”.

Another example. You’re about to have a conversation with your close friend about a conflict you’ve been having with each other. You’re running the fear/limiting belief of “I don’t matter”. As you go back and forth in the conversation, you leave out some of the parts that have caused you to feel the worst in the situation, because you feel you “don’t matter”. You come out of the conversation feeling not quite like you’ve been heard, and while your friend leaves thinking the matter is resolved, you’re still carrying frustration and resentment that’s going to blow up again soon.

How to best fears and limiting beliefs

To best your fears and limiting beliefs, the first step is AWARENESS. Looking back on some of your most dramatic notable communication experiences, you might be able to start identifying some of the ways your fears and limiting beliefs have influenced your results. You might even notice some common themes. Once you can see them, you’ve started the process of dismantling the power they have over you.

Taking this a step further, allow your conscious awareness of your fears and limiting beliefs to shed light on your behaviours when communicating. What words do you use when the fear/limiting belief is active? How does it affect your body, and subsequently, your non-verbal communication? This specific awareness will empower you to choose different behaviours.

Addressing the root cause

When coaching clients, I spend a fair amount of time with them identifying the fears and limiting beliefs that come up in their interactions and the associated behaviours that show up as a result. The most enlightening and liberating part of this process is connecting the fear and limiting belief back to a root cause. All fears and limiting beliefs come from somewhere. It could be from an elementary school teacher who harshly criticized your science project presentation or an abuser who threatened you if you spoke up and told anyone about their abuse. These are both real-life root cause situations I’ve come across that have affected a client’s ability to communicate.

Whatever the root cause is, once we’ve clearly identified the fear/limiting belief, there is a very simple, quick and powerful tool I use to root out (pun intended) the fear and limiting belief, as well as any negative emotions associated with it, so clients can thrive. It’s one of the biggest turning points and one of the most rewarding parts of the coaching process.

This week’s challenge

Take a blank page and draw a vertical line to create two columns. In the left column, write “Fear or limiting belief” in the right column, write “Where does it come from?”

Think of an upcoming situation that requires you to communicate – it could be an important conversation you’ve been needing to have with someone, a networking event, a public speaking event, or anything else. Take a few minutes to list all the fears and limiting beliefs that come up when you think about that communication.

Once you’ve listed all the fears and limiting beliefs, move to the second column “Where does it come from”. Brainstorm on what past situations, people or sources may be the cause of each fear and limiting belief. What are your “aha” moments? Share some of your discoveries in the comments below.

Befriend your intention

Befriend your intention in communication

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Think about the last conflict you had and the interaction(s) you had to resolve it. What did you want to achieve? No, what did you realllly want to achieve?

None of us are strangers to at one time or another saying we want to resolve a conflict, but entering into peace talks with the real aim of proving we’re right or showing the other person we know more. How do those conversations usually turn out?

All communication begins with intention. You’re either conscious of your intentions or you’re not. Our true intentions – not always the ones we say we have – will play out in the words we use and how our body and voice express themselves in all our communication experiences.

Why is intention so important?

Going into communication with one stated intention and having our words and body and voice demonstrate another quickly leads to loss of credibility and trust. And quite possibly even a loss of clients, a promotion, relationships, sales, and so on. We feel disappointed in ourselves for our lack of desired results, and we may not understand why, because we’re unaware of the crucial role intention is playing in the background.

Here’s another example. Say someone reaches out to you to have a one-on-one networking or informational meeting under the premise of getting to know each other and making a connection. You attend the meeting and after half-an-hour or so you find yourself viewing a catalogue of products and listening to promotions and you realize, “Wait a minute – am I being sold to?” Yes, you are, and you further realize this wasn’t an informational or networking meeting all along. At one point or another (or maybe more often than we’d like) we find ourselves on either side of this equation. It doesn’t feel so good, does it?

Honesty is the best policy

There’s nothing wrong with the intentions of selling or even proving you know more – as long as you’re honest with yourself and the other person or people about them and you recognize how your true intention is going to play out in an interaction through your words and body language and voice.

Owning our intention in communication requires us to look at ourselves on a deeper level and asking questions about who we are, what we want and how we want to achieve it. When we do this and own our intention, as well as share that intention with the person or people we’re communicating with, we’ll come across authentically, build trust and relationships, and likely have win-win outcomes.

Get to know your intentions

Think back to your last challenging conversation and see if you can pinpoint your true intention and whether it aligned with or differed from the intention you said you had before having that conversation. What were the outcomes of the conversation? How did the person or other people engage? How might those things be different if your intention were different? Do the same thing for a presentation or a meeting you recently had. Take notes and see if you can identify themes or patterns. If you notice a real, consistent disconnect between your stated and true intentions, you may want to explore why further, so you can begin to get the results you want from your communication.

This week’s challenge

Take a moment before the major communication events you have scheduled over the next week to acknowledge your true intention with respect to your stated intention. Notice if there is alignment and pay attention to how the intention plays out in your words and body language and voice in each of those communication events. If there is misalignment, take some time to realign before the event and experience the difference in your results.

In our next post, we’re going to explore what’s important to you and the value in knowing how it defines your unique communication blueprint.

Communication: What’s it all about?

Pop quiz. Did you know there are two outputs to communication?

If you guessed there’s a verbal output (the words we use) and a non-verbal output (what we do with our voice and body) ding, ding, ding, you’ve won yourself the opportunity to read the rest of this post! Ha.

All jokes aside, there are serious considerations to communication you’re overlooking that may be responsible for lacklustre results.

Percentages, percentages

If we were to put numbers to words, there are various studies that aim to quantify just how much of communication is attributed to the verbal versus the non-verbal. At its highest value, the non-verbal output of communication has been cited at 93% of communication. Some studies divide this number further to 55% body language and 38% voice. In either case, this leaves just seven percent for the verbal output of communication.

A word of caution – there are debates over the actual percentages of verbal versus non-verbal communication and whether we can even attribute numbers to them, since context is a huge part of any communication setting. What we want to recognize as our key takeaway is that non-verbal communication accounts for far more of communication than we give it credit for. And I’m going to guess, if you’re like most people, you spend most of your time preparing the verbal.

You don’t know what you don’t know

At this point in the history of humankind, our access to words is at the best it could ever be. Thank you smartphones and dictionary.com! When we’re not getting our point across or connecting with people the way we’d like, it’s not as simple to just say it’s because we used the wrong words. It’s what we’re not consciously accessing that’s causing us to miss our mark. Because it’s not conscious, we’re not even sure of what we’re supposed to be accessing to become the type of confident, articulate communicator we want to be.

Enter A Model for Conscious Communication. There’s a whole system of background inputs – operating unconsciously – that’s feeding our verbal and non-verbal communication. There are five inputs to this system and each one helps to make up our own unique communication blueprint.

Yes, you have a unique communication blueprint

There are reasons why replicating “guaranteed success” communication formulas from experts often ends in frustration and failure. It’s not because you’re not doing it right. What works for them isn’t necessarily going to work for you, because your blueprint is different from theirs. As we explore each input to A Model for Conscious Communication, you’ll see how uniquely you interact with the input and why you’re getting the results you are, and most importantly, how you can shift your results in your favour.

In my next post, we’ll cover the first input feeding communication. I guarantee you, it’s going to give you all the feels… By the way, that was a hint. 😉