Secret #4: Communication

When putting this together, I could imagine you saying to your self: "long time no mention" - I thought the same thing too. Indeed we’ve been chugging along – yes, our mottos are “progress over speed” and “quality over time”. New month, new topic - we're now on:

Secret #4: Communication: When you listen first then speak your heart with clarity and courtesy, you can lead others to change attitudes, behaviours, and situations.*

That is one word that is central to our lives – in fact it’s one you cannot “live” without. Indeed, at the risk of sounding morbid, we know one word used to describe those whose heart is no longer communicating to other parts of their body. That struck a cord with me when God explained it to me that way.

So you see, “communication” is a very important word and an important part of our world.

Let’s dig in to learn how we can “communicate to influence” positively. Influencing is about affecting something and having an effect on something – in summary it is about having a “result” (hopefully positive) on someone or something.

As we all know, “communicate” simply put means “sending and receiving of the same information”. There are 4 basic ways we communicate. With God helping us, as always, we’ll explore them:

•  Speech
• Script (same as Writing – it had to be a word starting with “S”)
• Signals
• Silence

The interesting thing about communication is that there is always more that can be said…now whether that “more” always has to be said is another matter altogether. We’ve touched on speech and signals somewhat when we discussed the WAALK (see the Self-control series from October 16, 2009) - but we still talk a bit about them again.

Watch out for subsequent postings...and feel free to join the conversation on communciation.

Reference:
*page 21 of The Esther Effect by Dianna Booher