Elevate Your Communications, Part 1

This is the first of a multi-part series on Communication. Recently I hosted an Empowerment Rising online gathering in which we focused on communication. As I was creating the content for this gathering, much of it initially focused on how to respond to various difficult situations that come up in communication, such as the other person choosing not to hear you, being combative, being silent. This was all going along swimmingly…until Spirit gave me the nudge to pull out a folder from a class I’d taken online a couple of years ago.

The class was on Compassion and was delivered by Thom Bond, who was a student of Marshall Rosenberg of Non-Violent Communication fame. As I reread that material, it became clear that what I had been creating for our online gathering needed a total revamp! I pretty much abandoned all of what had already been written down and started from scratch. Why? Because what I had been creating was helpful, but it totally missed the mark in terms of fostering deep, profound change to our messed-up communication patterns.

Instead I dug back into research I’d been a part of 30 years earlier and into Bond’s work for a drastically different approach to communication, a Divine Feminine approach. This approach follows the communication rather than trying to lead it, force it, direct it. Why this approach?

If you ask the majority of people whether or not they feel heard and understood in conversations, they’ll say no. People often feel they’re fighting to be heard, recognized, considered. They often walk away from “conversations” feeling frustrated, defeated, and questioning the value of having conversed in the first place.

The “solution” they’ve been seeking is how to more forcefully make their points, be heard, demand consideration. While this might seem like the logical solution, I’m going to suggest it is the Divine Masculine solution and, therefore, outdated in ways. Certainly we can currently see how shouting, demanding, and forcing opinions isn’t working all that well to foster understanding and change. So what instead?

A Divine Feminine approach to communication would be more receptive and open, following the conversation, reflecting what was heard, describing without interpretation what is noticed, avoiding questions, allowing. In other words, we step away from our own agendas and meet the other person in his/her need.

Let me start this odyssey into a new way of communicating with a quote by Chuang-Tzu:

"The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of understanding is another. But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty, to the ear or the mind. Hence it demands emptiness of all of the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right there before you that can never be heard with the ear nor understood with the mind."

Bond expands on this further by stating that when we come from empathy, we’re far likelier to have a successful interaction than when we come from a non-empathic position. The stuff I’m going to share with you now is likely to make you wince because what we normally consider to be an empathic response oftentimes is not. I definitely winced when I first learned this stuff and I certainly winced when I re-read it in preparation for the Empowerment Rising call. So here are some ways of responding in conversation that are NOT particularly productive. Notice how many of them you use. I know I have used them all and vastly overused several…sigh!

1. Comparing and One-Upping: “That’s nothing! Let me tell you about the time…”

2. Educating and Advising: “Here’s what you need to do…”

3. Discounting: “That’s not a big deal. You should just be happy that…”

4. Fixing and Counseling: “Calm down. You being upset isn’t going to solve anything…”

5. Sympathizing: “Oh you poor thing! That’s awful…”

6. Data Gathering and Interrogating: “Tell me exactly what happened. Has this happened before…?”

7. Explaining and Defending: “Well, you know, he’s probably under a lot of stress…”

8. Analyzing: “Have you considered this is a pattern for you?...”

Bond says “non-empathic communication fills the space; it doesn’t open it up”. So, Empathy…Empathy is the ability to resonate with another’s needs and feelings. It’s being mindful, questioning, wondering, curiosity about another’s lived experience. So that means a key to this whole deal is being able to see everything someone says, does, thinks as an attempt to meet needs.

And even though we can often see those needs, we’ve been taught something different…judgment. Judgment is how we’ve learned to communicate, but it doesn’t CONNECT us.

So we look at right and wrong vs what is this person trying to feel better about? We look at shoulds instead of the needs underneath the behavior.
So we want to learn to transcend our judgments by unpacking the need beneath it. And the key to figuring out the needs is to look at the feelings. And, while it seems like it ought to be easy to figure this out, as Bond so eloquently says, “We slip off the barely tread-upon path of awareness back onto the superhighway of judgment, blame, and habitual forms of thought”. And we certainly are seeing that right now, aren’t we?

I hope this first part of this series on Communication has piqued your curiosity and opened up a thought of “Okay, if what we’re doing isn’t working, what can we do instead?” because that will be the focus of the next installment in the series.