The Art of Communication

How to be Authentic, Lead Others, and Create Strong Connections

Judy Apps

• Publisher: Capstone
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780857088048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Kleinbetrieb

Bring nuance, depth, and meaning to every conversation you have

The Art of Communication is for anyone who senses that they could be communicating on a deeper level. Perhaps you are a confident communicator but suspect there may be more to the art of conversation that you have not yet been able to access. Or perhaps you feel that your conversations lack depth and meaning and that you'd like to enrich your relationships with others, if only you knew how. This book will address your concerns and show you how to engage wholeheartedly with others.

There's more to conversation than just clear, rational thinking. Left-brain rationality is important, of course, but neuroscience increasingly shows that the right-brain skills of creativity, intuition and spontaneity are essential in good communication. In this guide, you'll discover ways of tapping into the full conversational potential that lies dormant within you, adding a level of nuance and watching the result as your relationships blossom. You may even find that untapped value in the form of new insights, ideas and creative thoughts, emerges from your daily conversations.

• Access the more nuanced arts of conversation to create strong connections and tangible results
• Build cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural connections to communicate effectively with people from different backgrounds
• Activate your whole mind — not just your intellect — to bring creativity and depth to communication
• Learn to be open-hearted, spontaneous, vulnerable, intuitive, and captivating in every conversation you hold

From communication guru and bestselling author Judy Apps, The Art of Communication will show you how to breathe life into your relationships and produce powerful new thinking enabling you to transform the world you live in.

Part One
Introduction: Amazing Conversations

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Happy the moment when we are sitting here, you and I, With two forms and with two figures but with one soul, you and I.

– Rumi

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Some conversations give you a buzz of connection that surprises and delights. In such conversations time stands still and the boundaries between you collapse, allowing something new and exciting to emerge. But how can you encourage such connections to happen more often when conversation is by its nature spontaneous and unpredictable?

Prologue: Just Another Conversation

The little cabin we booked to rent in Shropshire was next door to an old house containing a restaurant that was shut at present. The owner, Elizabeth, came out to meet us and briefly explained that her husband wasn't available to open the restaurant during our stay as he was currently ill. She showed us around our cabin, invited us to contact her if we needed anything, and then withdrew. Later, as we strolled out to explore, we paused by display shelves in the front garden containing a variety of interesting jams and pickles and unusual garden plants for sale, set up by our host.

We didn't see Elizabeth again until the morning of our departure a few days later, when she emerged from the house to wish us goodbye. As we said our thanks and farewells, we quietly asked her about her husband, and she explained that after a few years of ups and downs with cancer, his condition was now terminal and the time remaining probably short. As we listened, she told us about his work as a restaurant chef, their life in other cities, and some of the challenges of running things on her own now. We admired her garden produce and plants and commented on the variety of birds that were attracted by the food she put out in feeders. Encouraged by our interest, she told us about her excitement a couple of days before, when in the early dawn she had witnessed five nuthatch fledglings leave the nest. Time was suspended for a few moments and I felt physically the frisson of our connection.

What was it? A short inconclusive conversation with a stranger. Yet I took much more from our conversation than some sad facts and some happier ones. It felt as if we had shared for a moment a larger theme of life. Such words are perhaps too abstract and fail to recognise how real the exchange felt – to each of us, I think. The truth lay in some in‐between‐ness; and it touched us.

What Is the Art of Communication?

I'm aware of so many oddities in communication. Why, for instance, did someone thank me for helping them make the best decision of their life on an occasion when I'd offered neither advice nor sympathetic words? And why did a friend come out with a form of words not even strictly connected with our conversation that unblocked a stuck feeling I'd had for a long time? Why did I feel a beautiful shiver of connection with someone during a conversation that superficially had merely been about the best time to visit Crete? And why did I get goose bumps in the silences between words in a conversation with someone?

Maybe you recognise that frisson of something shared? I have encountered it at different times in my life. Several years ago, on a course, chatting with a fellow participant for the first time, something about her words and attitude touched a chord so that I felt I had known her for a long time, and I went home buzzing with the energy of the encounter. I had the feeling sometimes also as a child, when my mother spoke to me about this and that at bedtime. I recall a tingling feeling of timeless pleasure and of not wanting the moment to end. There have been other times when someone has spoken to me of something personal to them and I've known that no response is needed, just my listening. What they are speaking about doesn't even have to be anything particular. It's sufficient that they are absorbed by it, and I am connected to them in their absorption, inside their space.

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Frisson of Connection

Before we go further, recall for a moment times when you've felt a special connection when you communicated with someone.

• Remember a time when you had a conversation that felt especially enjoyable or remarkable. Maybe it felt more real, more three‐dimensional somehow, than normal encounters? Or maybe an ordinary conversation miraculously lifted off to another plane and it was as if a veil had lifted between you? You felt a thrill of pleasure like waves of energy running all over your skin and you felt intensely alive.
• Spend a moment or two remembering the occasion and capture the feeling you had at the time.
• Ask yourself, what gave you pleasure? What made it exceptional? Accept whatever answers pop up in your mind.

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In such conversations you are met in your soft centre, that beautiful, timeless part of you. From time to time, through such communion, where two people draw close, something creative is generated, some idea, some insight, some glimpse of new wisdom or truth.

You may find my opening story inconclusive, even trivial, and a long way from what you've understood about communication, particularly business communication. A common received view is that communication is about having opinions, knowing what you want and ‘getting your message across'. But there's a huge gap between people hearing what you say, even appreciating aspects of it, and their connecting with you – let alone acting on what you say or changing their thinking or attitude because of it. Most talk – in meetings, the boardroom, presentations, conferences – doesn't cross that gap, however fluent your language, firm your voice and confident your physiology.

Clearly, conversation has unexplored depths that are not covered in simple manuals on small talk or conversational skills. For just as surely, my most productive conversations have been capable of breaking any of the usual ‘rules of conversation', such as clarity of purpose, sharing of time, use of questions to elicit information, avoidance of silence, focus on meaning and so on. Those who inspire and kindle new thinking are doing something different – fundamentally different. Genuine communication is about crossing that gap.

We all struggle with communication at times. Do you sometimes find yourself in a situation where you'd like to say something but don't know what to say, or you know what you want to say but can't find the right opportunity to say it? Have you chatted to someone, wanting to connect with them, but realised you weren't really communicating with each other at all?

When you examine communication, you might be struck by the artificiality and sheer awkwardness of many interactions, even between people who are accomplished in the art of conversation. The truth is that many interactions are less than authentic, as people tend to operate from habitual positions largely beyond conscious awareness – to fit in, please people or avoid embarrassment, look knowledgeable, be admired or seize business advantage.

In the final chapters of my last book, The Art of Conversation, I began to explore some of the ways we can connect more deeply and fruitfully with each other. But communicating at that level doesn't naturally result from increased competence. We talk about communication as if it's a skill you can acquire step by step, and to an extent that is true: there is much you can learn that will make your conversations more fluent and satisfying. But there is the uncomfortable truth that, however much you may hone your skills as a communicator, no matter how interesting your facts, however fascinating your stories, even how well you share the conversation, deeper more meaningful communication does not naturally follow on from conversational competence. It requires something rather different.

The Risks of Spontaneity

The first and major challenge of conversation is that it's essentially a spontaneous activity, an everyday improvisation. At times we can prepare, but we can't safely predict when we're going to have a conversation or how it's going to pan out. In conversation – there's no getting away from it – we have to think and speak on the hoof.

For many people, speaking freely represents a risky enterprise. Not only might the other person take something the wrong way, but you might also say something you might regret, or embarrass yourself by talking garrulously or having absolutely nothing to say. Surrounded as we are by spin, sound bites, Twitter and Facebook, spontaneity can feel downright dangerous. Today, a trivial unconsidered remark can go viral in minutes, spiralling out of control in the glare of digital publicity. The actor Benedict Cumberbatch innocently used an outdated word to describe actors of colour and was pilloried for it. The novelist Hilary Mantel was hit with death threats after comparing the Duchess of Cambridge's situation to that of a ‘shop window mannequin' in a thoroughly sympathetic article. Good reason to be cautious, you might think.

So, most people exert whatever control they can – ever more so in the current environment. Does such control work? It does, but only to a limited degree. Many recognise control for what it is and find it limited and tedious. Even leaving out ‘fake news', there is a widespread mistrust of words, especially words spoken powerfully. We no longer believe the tightly scripted speech and want something less formulaic and more energising than the talk of repetitive politicians, un‐nuanced interviewers, and relentlessly jolly media conversationalists.

POPULARITY OF THE UNPREDICTABLE

Among the public there is an appetite for more genuine communication that is partially fed by reality television programmes. Never has there been such curiosity to know the private lives and quirks of personalities in the media or to be a fly on the wall in t...