Improving Communication
I've been reading an incredible book - squeezed in and amongst my school responsibilities. It's called "Crucial Conversations - tools for talking when stakes are high".For me, personally, I've been challenging myself to change how I communicate. Sometimes, I'm a pretty gruff and short with people when I get "excitable". I can own that, so I'm endeavoring to soften the edges a bit... This book is helping to give me tools to use. It's another amazing, timely day to change.
Here's an excerpt:
"We're designed wrong. When conversations turn from routine to crucial, we're often in trouble. That's because emotions don't exactly prepare us to converse effectively. Countless generations of genetic shaping drive humans to handle crucial conversations with flying fists and fleet feet, not intelligent persuasion and gentle attentiveness.
For instance, consider a typical crucial conversation. Someone says something you disagree with about a topic that matters a great deal to you and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The hairs you can handle. Unfortunately, your body does more. Two tiny organs seated neatly atop your kidneys pump adrenaline into your bloodstream. You don't CHOOSE to do this. Your adrenaline glands do it, and then you have to live with it.
And that's not all. Your brain then diverts blood from activities it deems nonessential to high-priority tasks such as hitting and running. Unfortunately, as the large muscles on the arms and legs get MORE blood, the higher-level reasoning sections of your brain get less. As a result, you end up facing challenging conversations with the same equipment available to a rhesus monkey."
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