Discover why Mindfulness is the most important ingredient for effective communication and fulfilling relationships…
There is a saying that the quality of our lives depends mainly on how we communicate with others. For me personally, there is no question that communication skills are among the most important skills because, without good communication, there are no good relationships. And without good relationships, everything else is empty and meaningless.
That’s why I started holding regular communication workshops right at the beginning of my coaching practice. But, when I observed and analyzed my clients’ daily experiences, I often felt that something was missing. To be honest, I was not overly satisfied with the progress of most of them, even though I regularly followed the latest trends in the world of NLP and coaching related to communication skills.
This left me with many questions until I had a fascinating experience that I want to share with you. This experience opened my eyes and made me see things in a completely different way.
In short…
During an important (and very stressful) meeting with a potential client, I was able to look at myself from a completely objective perspective for a brief moment. And this happened quite spontaneously.
Even though it was brief, it had a profound effect on me at that moment. I realized how my unconscious emotional reaction to the stressful situation had completely distorted my perception of the actual circumstances.
It wasn’t that I didn’t try to use all the tools and skills I knew, but because of the distorted perception of the situation caused by my unconscious emotional reaction, everything I tried to do, I did to my detriment – and I could clearly observe that.
At that moment, I remembered the research findings that I often refer to in my TT Mindfulness workshops. They show that when we encounter a particular stimulus from an environment that normally creates stress, before an image of the situation forms in our brain, we create an emotion that fundamentally affects the image that forms in our brain. In other words, our programmed emotional reaction “controls” what we see with our own eyes. This is why people are said to make decisions based on emotion and justify their decisions with logic. Or, as one of the world’s most renowned experts in the field of communication and influence, Dale Carnegie, said over 100 years ago:
“When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.”
Thanks to the above experience and the numerous literature I studied afterwards, it is much clearer to me today that AWARENESS OF OUR PROGRAMMED EMOTIONAL REACTIONS is a key ingredient for effective communication and good relationships – especially in stressful situations.
Because as long as we are not aware of what is triggered in us in stressful situations and do not know how to create the necessary mental distance from it (detach ourselves from it), we just react automatically. In other words: We are not able to communicate properly because the image that is created in our brain is completely distorted and unrealistic.
Therefore, it is important to know that without a sufficient level of awareness and mental distance from programmed emotional reactions, there is no tool or technique that will help us – apart from small “cosmetic repairs” – to improve our communication skills and build deeper, more lasting and better quality private and business relationships.
The business world has recognized this fact and there are more and more companies offering training on Mindfulness. Ikea, Google, Yahoo and Nike are just a few of them.
If you really want to become a good communicator, I recommend you start working on the most important ingredient for successful communication, which is to develop a higher level of awareness of your programmed emotional reactions, because it depends on that whether you are communicating or just reacting to your own unconscious emotions (which are the result of your deep mental patterns that you don’t even know when they were created).
***
If you’d like to learn about tools to help you work directly on your programmed emotional reactions so you can communicate more successfully in your personal and business life, learn more about the TT MINDFULNESS program.
Through TT Mindfulness techniques such as Active Focus, the TZM Method, or TT Synergy, you gain quicker insight into your programmed emotional reactions and learn how to “catch” painful or unpleasant emotions before they “catch” you and affect your mood and behavior. In other words, you’ll learn how to “get ahead” of your programmed emotional reaction, which usually occurs in challenging situations, and offer a “fresh” insight rather than react habitually.