How We Can Communicate Better
Communication:
Communication is about expressing your thoughts, feelings, wants, and your opinions to the people in your life. Whether it is a co-worker, friend, lover, spouse, family member, kids and so on; your ability to communicate openly and honestly depends greatly on your listening skills, your ability to understand non-verbal communication, and emotional awareness. As simple as communication may seem often times much of what you try to communicate to others and they to you gets misunderstood, resulting in hurt feelings, frustration, and can cause conflict in both your personal and professional relationships. Because of this fact, some individuals go to great lengths to keep their thoughts to themselves. What makes communication even trickier is the amount of technological devices we now have. The reality is, communicating through technology is not only impersonal technology is incapable of conveying emotions, feelings, and has no way of showing you the unspoken communication of body language. Technology leaves room for someone to assume the tonality of your message, and can often times make a bad situation worse.
Remember, effective communication helps you better understand a person or a situation and enables you to resolve differences, build trust, respect, and creates an environment where caring, creativity, affection, and problem solving can flourish. Effectively communicating requires a combined set of skills such as attentive listening, your ability to manage stress in the moment, understanding nonverbal communication, and the capacity to recognize and understand your feelings and emotions as well as those of the individuals you are communicating with.
Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.
~Unknown
Emotional Awareness and Communication
Emotions play a significant role in how you communicate with others. It's how you feel, more then how you think that will motivate you to communicate. How you react to emotionally driven nonverbal cues, will affect both how you understand other people and how they understand you. If you struggle with staying in touch or getting in touch with your emotions you will find communicating your feelings or needs to others is hard because if you are truly out of touch with your emotions you most likely don't understand how you feel or even why you feel what you feel which in most cases can result in misunderstandings, conflict, and frustration. If you can't get down to the nitty-gritty of what is eating at you, you will most likely never address those uneasy feelings you have in certain situations. The end result, you fight with your spouse, or become embroiled in petty squabbles with the people you come into contact with. The reason? You are a ticking time bomb with a fuse that is running short at all times. Remember emotional awareness provides you the tools needed to understand both yourself and other people and the messages they are communicating to you.
Emotional Awareness, and the Affect it has on Communication
Emotional awareness helps you by:
Increasing your ability to understand and also empathize with what is going the people in your life.
Increasing your ability to understand yourself, and what is going on within you.
Increases your ability and motivation to interact and empathize with other people even if you do not agree with them.
Increases your ability to deliver uncomfortable information in a clear and effective manor.
Increases your ability to build strong, trust within all of your relationships, to think creatively, resolve conflicts, and solve problems.
Listening Effectively to Verbal and Nonverbal Communication
The most important aspect of effective communication, is listening. Listening is more then just hearing the words that are being uttered. It is about really getting how the person feels about what they are communicating. This includes being aware of many things such as the tone in their voice (tonality), and all of the wordless communication such as body language, posture, facial expressions, body movement, eye contact, even how they are breathing. Each and every one of these elements is sending you a message on what they are trying to communicate to you and how they feel about what they are communicating.
Reading Nonverbal Communication and Delivering Nonverbal Communication:
Reading the Nonverbal and Delivering the Nonverbal:
Practice observing people, public places, restaurants, shopping malls, and so on. Notice how people act and interact with one another; try guessing if they are friends or lovers simply by becoming aware of their interactions with one another. See if you can feel what they are feeling, whether it is disappointment, happiness, sadness, and do on by hearing and seeing what is going on.
Once you have really practiced reading the nonverbal communication of others, ensure you are fully aware of yours when you are communicating with the people in your life.
Make sure what is coming out of your mouth matches your nonverbal communication. Make sure you use tone properly as you can say hello in a negative tone, which contradicts the word hello completely. When you say hello it is supposed to be warm and welcoming in both your voice as well as your body.
Become aware of individual differences, people come from different cultures, different backgrounds, which heavily affects they way the communicate. So make sure you take into account their age, gender, culture, religion, and their current emotional state when you read someones body language.
When communicating make sure the tone of your voice is the right fit for the individual you are communicating with. Example, your voice should be different when you are addressing a child versus an adult. Remember to take into account their emotional state before communicating to determine the best way to address them.
Always use body language to convey positive feelings even when you may not actually be experiencing them. Example, being nervous for an interview, an important client presentation, maybe even a first date. Rather than entering a room with your head down walk in with your shoulders back, your head held high, smile, and maintain eye contact you will be surprised how confident you will feel and you will also help put the other person at ease.
Stress Management and Communication
Let's be honest, we all experience a certain level of stresses throughout our days, but when the stress becomes constant and overwhelming it can hinder your ability to effectively communicate. Stress disrupts your capacity to think clearly and creatively, or act appropriately. You are more likely to misread people when you are stressed, and highly likely to send off-putting of confusing signals when you are stressed. You don't want to live a life filled with regrets for doing or saying or for acting a certain way because you couldn't manage your stress.
Stress Relief and Commination:
Relieving Stress to Effectively Communicate:
Recognize when you are becoming stressed. Your body will give you signals such as your muscles being tight, clenched jaw, clenched hands, a knot in your stomach, and your breathing. Is it shallow? Are you remembering to breath?
Now, take a moment to calm yourself down, prior to having any conversations decide if it is a good idea to do so now or will postponing it give you a better outcome?
Managing your stress quickly:
Take a few deep breaths, imagine a place that brings you both tranquility and comfort such as the beach or the ocean, feel the light on your face, smell the soft subtle air, notice what you taste, and what you hear.
The quickest way to relieve stress when you need it the most is to use and become aware of EACH of your senses. Sight, sound, touch, and taste.
In order for each of us to live life to it's fullest we must cross the bridge from one mind-set to another.