What’s Conscious Communication Got To Do With You?
One Root - a Million Dandelions
Conscious Communication has covered areas from the philosophical to nuts and bolts communication practices. We’ve highlighted inroads to personal development and more effective management and leadership. Why? All of these areas rely on communication. Whatever we do to improve our communication improves virtually every other area of our lives. The more consciousness and awareness we bring to our communication, the more conscious and aware we become as people. Again, you may ask why. Why is this desirable?
Virtually every mistake we make in our lives and businesses can be traced back to a lack or lapse of this awareness. On the other side, we can give credit for virtually every success to our being conscious and aware. It’s been said that luck is the intersection of opportunity and preparedness. When we’re less aware, we miss opportunities, and no amount of preparedness can make up for that. On the other hand, when we’re more aware we don’t miss opportunities, and even if we’re not prepared, we can still improvise, and often pull out a success. Apparently, awareness has priority over preparedness when pursuing success.
So coming back to Conscious Communication as both a path and a practice for developing our awareness, how does this fit in our busy lives? When we look at all the things we’re juggling, it’s obvious why people feel overwhelmed. Every day we have a barrage of thoughts, feelings, wants, needs, plans, and actions. Every day we strive to keep things in order, to organize our lives, to achieve some kind of balance. Many ironically put off their own personal development, which would help with the struggle, seeing it as “just more things to do.”
What if we could apply just one process that could solve for all these concerns? What if paying attention to just one thing could streamline that barrage; organize our lives, and bring balance as well? One thing can do all that: Conscious Communication. Whether we’re striving to bring a group of people together for a common goal, or overcoming an internal block personally, Conscious Communication is the answer. This is what’s called an Integral Solution. When we can find one singular root behind a million issues and events; one entity that touches every other aspect of our lives, we’ve found a simple yet powerful area to work with.
The Mortar Between the Bricks
If you think of every thought, feeling, action, and person as a puzzle piece, linking and touching each other, what is in the space or the cracks between them? Communication. Whether it’s the communication between your senses and your brain, your emotions and your body, or your self and your boss, information is being transmitted, received, and interpreted. Communication is perhaps the most pervasive, omnipresent thing in your life. I’ve often compared it to the Dark Matter throughout the Universe: an “invisible” medium between everything, touching everything, and perhaps binding everything as well.
So if we truly want to deal with the millions of things in our lives in an efficient manner, why not deal with the soup that they’re all swimming in? Communication. And since we know that increased awareness and consciousness results in seeing more opportunities and doing things better the first time, the logic of applying that consciousness to our communication is inescapable.
If there’s any question as to whether we have room to improve, the estimates for how much of our lives are unconscious range from 70 – 90%. We operate from rote behaviors and outdated scripts most of the time. If you don’t believe this, just try to pay attention to every minute step of something you do every day. It’ll seem really weird. That’s because normally you don’t pay that kind of attention. We filter billions of thoughts, feelings, and actions out of our consciousness, because we simply don’t have the bandwidth to handle it all. This is just one more reason to pick one area to focus your consciousness.
Benefits Not Features
Starting with the most obvious area, Interpersonal Communication can either facilitate relationships and projects or destroy them. Whether with co-workers or family members, when we’re in auto-pilot, we say things that we don’t mean, we try to impress rather than listen, we speak from defensiveness rather than openness, and we can be completely incongruous with our message vs. the tone of voice we use to deliver it. Our unconsciousness further disables correcting these things, as we don’t notice that we did them in the first place, and assume it’s the other person’s problem.
There’s another unconscious pot hole: assumptions. Assumptions, projections, and avoidance are unconscious ways to not fully engage or interact with another person. They’re methods for having the entire exchange in our own heads, which means we’ll almost always be wrong.
That goes for the defensive tactics we unconsciously use to separate ourselves from others, when we know consciously that connecting serves us better. Being right, already knowing, already being “fine,” and all the childlike ways we block our vulnerability, inevitably prevent us from learning and growing. This is what created Top-Down communications in the business world, which prevented millions of organizations from evolving and improving their processes. Management couldn’t listen to labor, because they had to maintain the illusion of already knowing everything and being “smarter.”
Conscious Communication is a major time-saver in the same vein as “measure twice, cut once,” or “a stitch in time saves nine.”
- When we don’t use this consciousness, we inevitably spend much more time fixing, clarifying, and putting out fires.
- Being explicit, we eliminate all the interpretations and subtext people can invent and act upon.
- When we pay attention to Trigger Words, we increase our compassion and eliminate those fires to put out.
- When we pay attention to another person’s Tempo, Phrasing, and Perspectives, we can build rapport faster, which facilitates a functional relationship.
And finally, becoming the best you possible requires Internal Communication that is of the highest quality as well.
- The stories you tell yourself (and others) can limit and drive you where you don’t want to go.
- The way you motivate yourself (and others) can be completely dysfunctional or exceptionally effective.
- Being conscious that your Perceptions are not “The Truth,” but merely a piece of a larger puzzle gives you the ability to gather more information.
- Recognizing that your Interpretation of Events is controllable gives you power and freedom in the face of those events.
- Being conscious that both Survival Thinking and Success Thinking are Self-Propagating, and that you are in charge of which you choose, depending upon your internal communication, gives you power and freedom in your life.
In short, there is no other single thing you can do that will so positively affect every area of your life. Conscious Communication is an Integral Solution, and it’s always within your grasp.