Success Through Communication

Communication is not always what we say, or do, but it is also what or who we are

What is being successful and what relation it has with your ability to communicate?

There is no such as thing as absolute success. Everyone needs to define his or her own definition and indicator of success. For a student appearing an examination, success could be passing that examination with high marks. For a romantic young man, success may be successfully dating with women he likes. For a corporate Chief Executive officer, the success could be making effective presentation on his project to fetch funding from the donors. For a spiritual leaders success may be attainment of enlightenment. For artist and celebrities, success is become popular. For some people, being successful means having a happy family. The dictionary has rightly defined success as an event that accomplishes its intended purpose. While sometimes, the intended purpose may be clearly defined by some indicators, most of the time, achieving success is abstract, when a success can be achieved at feeling level only. For example, having a loving relationship with someone is only abstract thing that can be only felt but not really seen. But it is still there, very real.

In whatever way we choose to define and derive the meaning of success to suit our own need and circumstance, the most important factor to be successful is to have good relationship with other people. At least, in the end, the purpose of being successful itself is feeling loved and liked. So your success and popularity depends upon your relationship with other people, which depend upon your ability and skill to communicate well.

What is communication to you?
Dictionary has rightly defined communication as a connection allowing access between persons, places or souls with purpose. This somehow defies with our day-to-day common understanding of communication, which over focuses on " Verbal communication" experience through ear, and brain only. This has limited our understanding and skills to communicate well. We always thought of improving our communication by following certain format, or external procedures and failed to understand what communication actually is? Communication is not always what we say, or do, but it is also what or who we are?

How can we learn to improve communication?
In order to improve our communication skills including the formal ones that we need in our professions, we must address them at all the following 3 levels in order to achieve complete success.

I have seen many great speakers, who mastered the art of public speaking by following certain format. But I hardly see any behavioral change they were able to bring in audience through their speech. Sometimes it is like say, " Surgery was successful but patient died".

It is also like formal degree/s people obtain from Nepalese universities with their hard earned money, just to discover that what they learned were of no use in achieving success in the real world. This is one of the many reasons for peoples’ frustration and employment problems in Nepal.

Technical Level

Technical /formal level of communication is what we learn through formal and established time tested process including what we learn in the formal institutions. These are like cooked food, the recipe of which is already provided to you. Such as the steps that you follow, words that you choose, body language, fluency, preparation, use of external devices such as PowerPoint may make the communication easier but they make you loose human touch.

Learning the formal methods of communications in various forms is almost "inevitable" for acceptance and self-discipline. You can learn from practices, reading various books, observing others speak, and learning at formal institution specialized in such areas. But irony is even after you gain a PhD degree in communication, you may still feel lacking in your effort to communicate well in the real world.


Mental Level

Understanding our mental factors that affect our communications to a great extend that people do not choose to accept. You cannot communicate well if you are angry, sorry, excited, or mentally disturbed by some events however small it may look to other people. You can talk well in the afternoon, if you feel badly affected by a quarrel with your friend or spouse in the morning. So you need to stay cool and relatively at peace in order to be able to communicate well whether in a meeting with your colleagues, or in the presentation to your donors. Your mental state of mind affects your physical capacities of communications such as your body language, expressions, tones, convictions, and others, which are the manifestation of your mental state of mind.

What affects our mental capacity to communicate well?

1) Experience at Conscious level: Your memory
Your physical memory, which occupies a very small part of your overall "Memory Iceberg", plays a great role in determining your quality of communication. What you think at the time of communication directly affects your voice, reaction, expressions and final reflection on personality. If you feel lousy or deceived, or inferior about yourself, there is no way that your audience will feel any better about you. Your audience will see the same picture of you as you mentally see the picture of yourself at the time of presentation. So it is important also review and correct, communication at the mental level in order to be successful communicator. Otherwise there will be conflict between what you say and what you communicate through your expressions and body language, which responds to the command of your mind, not what you say.

2) Self Esteem: Acknowledging your own worth: How you feel about yourself?
As a result of or depending upon state of your mind, and your internal dialogues about yourself, you will form an internal opinion of your own worth: whether you are valuable to this world from your perspective. It is called "Self Esteem" level of which determines the quality of what you express through your voice, body language, and expressions. It is one thing that is so clear and transparent to everyone except to you and is perhaps the most important factors for success in life. Relatively, we Nepalese have very low self-esteem as nation as well as individual citizen that reflects everywhere- media, politics, and at home when we are yelling at our wives, children, and our dependents. It needs to be corrected. When we feel low and inferior, we tend to show more high and superior and that affects how we treat others, which in turn affects our relationship and finally our desire to be successful.

3) Self confidence: having confidence in yourself
We hurt others when we hurt ourselves. We trust others when we trust ourselves. When we are wondering why we cannot trust other people, at the mental level, what we are saying is we do not trust ourselves. Every character and quality that we see in other people is actually our own reflection of how we feel, and think of ourselves. So the state of having or not having confidence on us, which is described as having nor not having "self confidence" greatly influence our communication skill. So we need to correct communication at the confidence level also.

4) Assertiveness: Don’t say YES when you want to say NO
Sometimes we accept to do things out of obligation or to avoiding displeasing others or to gain approval, even when we do no like it. For example- sometimes our spouse asks us to buy something that we cannot afford. To avoid confrontation, we unwillingly give in to her/his demand and resent so strongly that we take every opportunity to yell at her or insult her in some other way for the fault she never committed. A simple No, and little confrontation could prevent big quarrel later. Similarly, female employees should frankly say NO to any unreasonable request of her male colleagues, however small or un-harmful it looks at the initial stage. Assertiveness on her part to say NO to indication of indecent advancement at the initial stage can save a whole relation and unpleasant situation. Don’t say YES when you want to say NO.

5) Forgiving yourself: There is no such thing as mistake.
When one is not confident and assertive, it eats up internally. One feels hurt, and guilty. That will create a vicious cycle of low self-esteem, low self-confidence and unassertiveness. This is disastrous to your communication ability. That is when people choose to suicide rather than to speak to mass, if given chance. Only way to break this vicious cycle is forgiving one’s Self. We must learn to be gentle and kind towards ourselves. Our ability to forgive ourselves creates ability to forgive others.


Spiritual level/abstract level:

1) Acknowledging the abstract/ Unmanifest level
Some times we like something or hate other things for no reason. There is no clear reason. We simply feel the way we feel. However best we try to ignore that such feeling, we cannot ignore. We fall in love with one person, like other person; hate another person, seemingly for no reason. Sometimes we have special obsessions or phobia for things for no apparent reasons. When we experience such things, it is at abstract or unmanifest level that is not seen but sensed with feeling. Although they are hard to explain, they are as real as you and me. We will not satisfied if we do not feel something "right" in our heart. Sometimes, such internal feeling guides us and saves us from disaster. The quality of our communication also depends upon our ability to listen, and hear our inner voices, that are so clear but provide us feeling or sense of whether we are in right path or not.

2) Subconscious mind: An iceberg of spiritual and physical experience that determines our behavior
On the physical and mental level, our actions are monitored by the conscious part of our mind iceberg, which is very small. You can say it is less than 5 %. The rest of our behavior and action are controlled by another bigger part of our mind: which is far bigger and called subconscious mind. Simply stated, subconscious minds are storage of memories and experiences that overflow from the conscious part of our mind. It seemingly seem to disappear and influence our mind and body from behind, where we can see but only feel and sense. Usually we remember conscious mind, which is full of memory, but in fact much of behavior and attitude is monitored by our subconscious part of mind-iceberg.

If our mind is full of bad experience at the subconscious level, we will feel bad about ourselves in everyway and therefore will not be able to communicate well. This will affect our ability to succeed. Therefore it is as important to correct things at physical and mental level, as it the spiritual level, in order to master the art of communication.

3) Mental Manifestation:
It is common belief that we are the independent observer of this world around us, which already exists. We are like guest who comes and go back. For example, when we are in meeting, we think that meeting is happening to us. We forget that it is us who are actually "manufacturing these scenes around us. We manufacture these scenes, and circumstances around us by using our thoughts, and experiences, experienced at subconscious level as raw materials. If we are brought up in a situation where we felt poor, deprived, and suppressed, we produce our gloomy world with these raw materials and become poor and unhappy. But if we are filled up with good experience, the world that we manufacture will be a happy world. This process is called mental manifestation, by which our subconscious mind produces world around us using our experiences and memories as raw materials. The understanding this process will lead us to manifest a better world for us deliberately, with the help of meditation.

4) Is REALITY real? No it is not.
When a jealous boy friend sees his girl friend with another man, his only reality is that his girl friend has deceived him. At that time and place that looks like an absolute reality to him. But his girl friend might have another reality. The boy she walked with might just be her brother, cousin or a friend. So there is no absolute reality. Yes, there is shared reality, which comes from shared beliefs of many people within a community. So just because, many people believe something, it does not mean it is an absolute reality. It simply means that many people share this particular reality, but it does not necessarily represent
Correctness. Now can we change "reality"? Yes, at different level, again. Our reality changes with our value systems, which changes with change of our thoughts and beliefs. The reality is manifestation of our thoughts and beliefs.

5) Visualization:
We can change our reality by changing our internal vision of our world. We can deliberately do it through visualization process. But the problem I see now days in the corporate sector is that they take it more or less as a fashion to show off. People first need to understand how visualization works and to follow the correct steps.


Some tools to improve communication at mental and spiritual level


1) New God that I found: "My own higher self"

I found new god whom if we worship would help us improve our communication, through improved self esteem, confidence and assertiveness.

- Close your eyes
- Take 21 times breath
- Scan your body from toe to head
- Imagine an image of "your higher self" coming out of your body and wish that image respectfully. Say, " Please help me improve my self image".
- Then imagine your higher self hugging you and showing respect.

Do this everyday and for at least 21 days. If you do that honestly and with full commitment, you will find the positive changes in your lives.

2) Achieving what you want through visualization.

- Close your eyes
- Take 21 times breath
- Scan your body from toe to head
- Imagine what you want to be or what you would see yourself doing or the things that you want as clearly as possible. Suppose, if want to build a new house you need to clearly visualize the kind of house that you want.
- Repeat this visualization on daily basis until your vision is achieved.
- What you will achieve may not be that obvious as you imagine but it will manifest the favorable situation.
- Believe in what you aspire. Trust yourself.

3) Improving confidence to improve your communication skills

- Close your eyes
- Take 21 times breath
- Scan your body from toe to head
- Imagine yourself speaking in front of a large audience.
- Imagine that your audience is enjoying your presentation.
- Imagine a beautiful lady (a handsome man if you are female), among the audience looking and listening your speech admiringly.
- Finally imagine that at the end of your speech, there were clapping and admiration from the audience and also imagine, that beautiful lady coming and giving you a red rose.
- Repeat this process before presentations, or public speech. This will definitely improve your confidence.
- Believe in what you aspire. Trust yourself.