Archive for October, 2007

Obstacles to healthy communication are a direct outgrowth of the mind’s tendencies to judge, blame, and assume intent - collectively, the compulsion to evaluate.

These tendencies put up walls and turn people who are simply different from us, or who disagree with us, into adversaries.

The mind wants to label them as wrong and/or bad. The mind tells you they are misguided, stupid, and sinful.

You may feel the need to show them their errors.

Whether the issue is sexual behavior or something as trivial as washing the dishes, the outcome is the same: people who are different, who do things differently, or who disagree arouse anger and must be defeated or punished.

The compulsion to evaluate involves wearing emotional blinders. These blinders leave you so consumed with defending yourself that you likely miss what’s really going on.

You don’t see when others are hurt or needing validation or are trying desperately to connect with you. You ignore vital information, including your own deeply felt pains and hurts, because it has nothing to do with winning.

Evaluation also hurts your relationships because it prevents you from seeing life through another person’s eyes. Your sense of perspective is greatly diminished or distorted.

Education is to be considered, whenever one thinks about improving finances, body image or a relationship. The two just seem to naturally go hand in hand.

It means that you are educating yourself about some aspect of the situation or learning about how to do something regarding your body by improving your state of affairs or your body often times.

Employers value education because it shows them that you are willing to put worth the effort to learn a subject and thus likely to also put worth the effort to learn a job related skill.

Better Decision Making

You can have better decision-making skills by acquiring knowledge through education. Making better decisions leads to improved situations and as a result increases your happiness.

Problem Solving Solutions

When some problem occurs, we search out self-help books or Websites on the subject so as to learn about the causes of problem.

With a hope to learn new ideas and new ways of solving the situation we seek these books and Websites.

You can come up with the solution for the situation or problem by educating ourselves about it. Let’s face it if we already knew all the answers the situation or problem would most likely not exist.

Are you being candid? If you are being true, real and keeping it simple, you will be open and candid. They are like flipsides of a coin.

Mind, intention and character will all come together, synergized in and through, what and how you have to say and deliver something verbally!

Goals, Direction, and Intent… worded differently, encompass a clear aim and purpose…

There has to be a reason and goal, purpose and motivation for something ‘oratory’ to be deemed successfully delivered!

• Find out your strengths and capitalize on them.
• Being true and purposeful, deliberate and open is important. Deception and hidden agendas will NOT be acceptable.
• Being empathetic and understanding is critical as well.

Speaking up with ability and confidence…

You are your own best/worst enemy when in these public speaking situations. Are you tapping into your strengths and resourcefulness? You have only yourself to rely on when you are up there ‘speaking’.

You have to anticipate and be at the ready for anything. You should reflect and introspect as often as you can. You will have to plan and prepare EVERYTIME! Sometimes you will even have to make the choice to take the risk of failure if necessary.

One of the keys to becoming less ruled by what your mind tells you is to learn the skill of watching your mind.

You can do it, but it takes time and practice. Your mind didn’t start throwing evaluations at you overnight. It’s been going on for a long lifetime.

The skill of watching your mind will take practice and commitment, but it’s a powerful tool for changing your experience of anger.

To get started, try completing the exercises as described below.

Each exercise will help you detach from the compulsion to evaluate and believe those evaluations. Do one exercise at a time to see which ones work best for you.

It’s important to give yourself enough time with each exercise. These exercises are not magic bullets. They require practice.

A good starting point is to set aside at least ten to fifteen minutes each day to practice an exercise. Give each of them a few days of practice before moving on to the next.

Exercise: Mind Watching

Mind watching requires you to be a true observer of your consciousness. Here’s how you do it:

Several people make a decision to change their lives for the better once they came to a conclusion that life has gotten boring and there is definite room for improvement.

However, is community involvement and volunteerism is one aspect of self improvement which people might glaze over.

On the other hand, the truth is that the act of helping other people has big potential for improving a person’s self esteem besides to improving social, occupational, and educational status.

It just feels good to help other people. The person is assisting the community in one way or another if he or she volunteers to feed hungry people, or walk dogs at a shelter, or work at an information desk, or maybe even get involved in a community theater group,.

Therefore, self improvement is augmented by community improvement. It is a powerful feeling when people know that they are needed, wanted, and helping can turn the make the world a better place.

Volunteering

People should volunteer in a capacity which appeals to them and by doing so the act of volunteering will definitely derive happiness to them. It’s one of the perks of volunteering.

The ability to see, envision and imagine, painting a verbal picture with words.

Calling into your minds eye and imagination vivid images and analogies, metaphors etc, is a powerful tool and utility to have that will make easy your public speaking more and more as you master and hone your craft. It can be mightily powerful.

Always try to picture and envision, see in your minds-eye and imagination what you are reading about.

Try and verbally describe and paint the picture to someone else. Write things you see and impressions you have in your own words.

A great way to exercise this skill is to often practice writing things from memory. Try and describe something around you vividly. Try a raging storm, a sea-landscape, a battle-scene in a movie, the starry sky at night, a camp-fire.

These will all help you hone and harness your visualization [Visualization Techniques] and projection qualities and abilities.

Paying attention and concentration…

Developing and keeping your interest in something will help you greatly when practicing and utilizing this skill. Typically there are things that get and keep our attention easily:

• Some things familiar and comforting

Like an observer you know that how anger affects you. It’s time to map how your anger really works - the process of your anger.

Use the techniques of mental DVD to remain a here-and-now observer of your experience.

Either adopt the house perspective or use the mental DVD to recapture an anger event that was too overwhelming to track as it unfolded.

What have you learned? On a separate piece of paper, record as much detail as you can in the following anger map exercise.

Exercise: Your Anger Map

Pre-Anger Feelings:

Describe the emotions and physical sensations you noticed this week preceding your anger episode. Is there typically one feeling, or are there several that may show up at the beginning of your anger process?

How do these feelings affect your sense of self-worth? Do you find yourself wanting to escape or suppress them? Are there physical sensations preceding anger that are painful or uncomfortable? Does anger help to push them out of your awareness?

Trigger Thoughts:

Write down as much as you can remember about any painful images or memories that come up in anger situations. What judgments do you typically make about other people?

Moving up and down the scales and slides, nuances of your voice-range and scope will show your train of thought.

It helps the audience track better what it is that you are trying to say and convey.

If you want to pause or place emphasis on something, you will naturally feel your voice raise or go slightly higher.

The inflection in your tone and modality of your voice goes up. Monotone presentation is boring and excruciating to listen to. By using these tones in your voice, you can easily show how things differ. They tell a story.

This gliding up and down your vocal scale can be used to show that something is of importance, stands out and even be very direct and strongly voiced, put or expressed. Soft, wavy tones can show empathy and beauty, grace and understanding.

Here are the rules you have to remember when using inflection in public speaking:

The rational and valid uses of the rising inflection:

Here are some examples as to when the voice inflection going up is quite effective:

• When you are expressing any forms of doubt or possible contingency
• Incomplete sentences