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 Perception is Not Reality [8:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

There’s an old expression that masters of illusion love to use: “perception is reality.”  Actually, in the cold light of day we find that perception is not reality.  Perception is what we react to, as if it was reality.  Perception is a kind of story, made up of filtered memories, projections, assumptions, and most importantly interpretations of stimuli.  We can perceive what is not present, or not perceive what is present.  We see what we expect to see, don’t see what is “off our radar,” and emphasize or minimize in accordance with our beliefs and upbringing.  What causes trouble is simply that perception gets promoted to “Truth,” and we fall into the trap of defending it as such.

It’s almost too cliché to bring up the familiar car accident witnessed by five people, each of whom sees a different accident, except that this example works so well to illustrate the concept.  Witness statements are always vulnerable to cross-examination because our ability to perceive is not objective, as if through a camera lens.  The interpretive aspect of our perceptions makes them very subjective. 
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 Verbal Accuracy [8:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

While being strongly inspired to address this subject, I suddenly felt a sense of déjà vu.  Indeed I had been down this road before.  In fact, Chapter 37 of my book, “Kind Ambition” is called, “Say What You Mean – one thing leads to another,” and rings as true today as it did then.  So if I may be so bold as to quote myself, let’s look at an easily implemented improvement to our communication.  All it requires is a little extra consciousness.
 
Words are wonderful double-edged swords.  Their specific meanings and their ambiguity are both the joy and bane of our conversations.  Wordplay depends on words having shades of meaning or multiple meanings, that we can take in one direction, and then suddenly whip in another.  This is the basis of some of my favorite comedy, and unfortunately, it’s also a potential fork in the road when we’re trying to communicate.  With every split, we find ourselves knee deep in conflict before we know what happened.
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 Slowing Down to Speed Up [8:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

There are things we learned in childhood from fables, parables, and mythology that we either forget or dismiss by the time we’re adults. Some of them contain lessons we really would benefit from remembering. For example, our topic: sometimes to speed up we need to slow down. Perhaps because this seems to be a contradiction, we dismiss it pretty quickly.

It becomes another one of those things we know, but we just don’t follow. What’s up with that? Why don’t we do these things we know deep down inside will serve us? Read the rest of this entry »

 

 Internal Prejudice [8:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Hierarchies
Our less-than-conscious communication takes place both internally and externally. What we rarely think about is the unbreakable relationship between the two. As in most things in our physical world, an event is usually followed by its repercussions, in the way a pebble hits the water and ripples emanate outward.The way we talk to ourselves internally invariably affects the way we talk to others externally. Those ripples keep going as the way we talk to others then affects them, and they in turn affect others in their surroundings, and so on.

So let’s start with that first pebble. Internally, we often insult or berate ourselves when we make mistakes or forget something. This becomes a kind of “normal” way for us to react, and we don’t think twice about doing this when others make mistakes or forget things. Read the rest of this entry »

 

 Patience and the Big Picture [8:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Patience seems to be a pretty normal and accepted aspect of looking at or dealing with details, but when it comes to the Big Picture, we seem to run out, as if patience were a limited resource.  People even assert their lack of patience as a function of being Big Picture thinkers, as if there were an unquestionable relationship between the two.  In fact the only relationship between being a Big Picture thinker and a lack of patience is the one we create.  And as much as this may annoy some people, that says more about a kind of laziness, than a necessary connection.

Patience and Big Picture thinking are not mutually exclusive; in fact they work together to create a superior outcome.  We just need to put in the effort to learn patience.
 
There’s an almost “crazed” and frantic rush in our lives that has little connection to reality.  It becomes blatant on the road, but this same impatience shows up subtly in other important parts of our lives.  Read the rest of this entry »

 

 Consciousness and Pain Prevention [9:15m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Our less-than-conscious communication causes so much unnecessary pain for ourselves and others, and because it is less than conscious, it rarely gets addressed.  We hurt ourselves and those around us with so much regularity that it fades into the background as normalcy.  We put our energy into being tougher and more calloused, rather than increasing the consciousness around our words.
 
Ironically, this requires more energy in the long run, and adds the downside of further separation and isolation from one another. It also maintains an antagonistic relationship with ourselves that blocks us from achieving our full potential. The upside is that Read the rest of this entry »

 

 Transparency in Communication [9:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

You’ve heard that nature abhors a vacuum.  Things rush in to fill them.  This can have a harmful effect when it comes to communication.  We tend to fill in the blanks when we perceive missing information.  Unfortunately, we don’t fill in the blanks with happy puppies and butterflies.

In our desire to protect ourselves, we construct negative or worst-case scenarios to fill in the voids.  If we don’t get invited to a party, we’re more likely to assume we were purposefully excluded than it being an accidental oversight.  This is a pretty interesting phenomenon when you think about it.  Without any information at all, we invent it out of thin air.  Because of this habit we have with gaps in information, over-communicating has to be superior to under-communicating.  If we don’t leave gaps, people don’t fill them with negative assumptions.

I’ve addressed aspects of this phenomenon before both in “Kind Ambition,” and in previous episodes of Conscious Communication.   We know that assumptions are almost always wrong, and yet reach for them as compulsively and unconsciously as the next potato chip.

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 Standard Podcast [8:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In our last episode we touched on some lessons about successful teamwork that we can learn from Auto Racing, and there are hundreds more to be found if we keep digging. To shift our focus a bit for this exploration, let’s look at some insights and successful strategies from racing that are more for you as an individual.