When it comes to communicating, you can't assume that people will know what's going on inside your head. To really be understood, you need to translate your inner experience into words so that you represent yourself accurately and so that you don't leave anyone else guessing.
Letting others know what you're feeling, thinking and wanting, of course, takes both understanding yourself moment by moment and having the skills to bring inner information about yourself to the surface where it's available when you need it.If you're like most people, you may want to understand and to express yourself better, yet maybe you don't know where to begin. Here's where Sherod Miller comes to the rescue with a handy little book called "Straight Talk" that offers straightforward and amazingly simple techniques to anyone who'd like to achieve success as a communicator.
The foundation for Miller's approach consists of a conceptual tool termed the Awareness Wheel - a mental camera that you can activate at any given time to bring aspects of your inner self into focus.
Envision a wheel with a hub and five spokes. At the hub place any issue or event you'd like to examine:
- Your relationship to a person you're dating.
- Your weight.
- The promotion you expected and lost.
- Why you and your teenager are getting along better.
Whatever you put in the center of your wheel, five essential kinds of information feed into it, representing the five spokes of the wheel: the sensations, interpretations, feelings, intentions and actions that together create the sum of your experience.
Mixed together, these experiences can frequently overwhelm and confuse you. The Awareness Wheel, however, can help you break down the unwieldly whole of an experience into the parts that cause it. You can examine each part separately, and suddenly the whole may take on a new coloration. What didn't make sense before may make sense now.
To go through a sorting-out process, jump in at any spoke of the Wheel and work your way around it, considering again the five spokes. Once you have focused on what you're experiencing in any of these categories, use "straight talk" in the form of first-person statements to describe this experiencing to others:
- Sensations - Identify and describe to others what you are seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching:
- I hear a lilt in your voice.
- I see you staring off into space.
- I smell the aroma of cookies.
- Intentions - At any one moment you may want, for example, to approach, to support, to persuade, to clarify, to cooperate, to share, to be friendly or to be honest. Use such clear concepts to describe your intentions to others:
- I want to go skiing tomorrow.
- I want be happy (or accepted).
- I want to clarify my feelings.
- Feelings - Tune in to clues that can alert you as to how you feel, including physiological signs (your heart beats rapidly when you're excited), behavioral signs (raising your voice if you're angry) and indirect expressions of feelings (putting someone else down when you feel hurt).
Once you're in touch with your feelings, use feeling words (such as pleased, satisfied, elated, anxious, sad) to express directly what you're experiencing:
- I feel sad we don't do as much together as we used to.
- I feel discouraged about the way I play bridge.
- I'm delighted to hear from you.
- Interpretations - This includes your idiocyncratic thoughts, impressions, conclusions, opinions, beliefs and attitudes. Thus, use self-statements that leave no question that you're describing any experience other than your own:
- It's important to me.
- My impression is different.
- This is what I'm experiencing.
- Actions - Include not only what you say and how you say it, but the kinds of things you do as well: walk, laugh, whine, frown, nod, interrupt, watch, yell, listen, smile, etc. Action statements include what you did in the past (I tried to call you yesterday), what you are doing presently (I'm listening) and what you will do in the future (I'll try to be less critical).
Using the Awareness Wheel to identify and then to relate what you're truly experiencing inside will help you create genuine, upfront exchanges, says Miller. That, in turn, makes for stronger emotional connections with others. And isn't that, he asks, what life is all about?