105. Modern, Creative Communication

"Every person has a responsibility to be a participant in this society and make it a better place for everybody, in whatever capacity they can." 
-Megan Rapinoe

When was the last time you updated and strengthened your communication strategies? It is probably time! 

Transcript

“Every person has a responsibility to be a participant in this society and make it a better place for everybody, in whatever capacity they can.” This quote comes from Megan Rapinoe, the professional soccer player who has completely revolutionized women's athletics. 

Welcome to the Modern Creative Woman podcast. And this is for women like you who want to elevate their creativity and start applying creative thinking in their everyday life. I'm your hostess and creativity expert, Doctor Amy Bakos. There are conversations and creative insights. I'll provide simple, science backed tricks and proven creative practices that will help take the mystery out of the creative process so that you can start each day feeling empowered, creative and ready to take on whatever comes your way. Let's get started. I hope you're having an amazing day, and I want you to reflect on communication, how you communicate to yourself, and how you communicate to others. This relates a lot to what we've been talking about with boundaries. Having a clear sense of what our inner and outer boundaries are gives you the opportunity to then communicate your needs. So this topic seems the natural next step after you've established some boundaries. The great communicator, Oprah Winfrey says that great communication begins with connection. And I think that's incredibly important to remember that we first have to be connected to ourselves in a place where we're able to give and receive effective communication, and we have to be connected to the person or the group or the situation who is communicating with us. So those inner spaces for communication include knowing ourselves. And as far as I can tell, we need other people to reflect back to us aspects of ourselves that are hidden from us. It's normal. It's natural that we can't see everything about ourselves. It requires someone to mirror back to us how we are, and to guide us in a way that points us to where we want to go. This is why connection with quality friends, family members you trust. Therapist A group of people working together can give us that mirror to help us not only look at ourselves, but look at others and see if we want to be that as well. It's good to have mentors to kind of guide us and inspire us, and it's also good to have those very personal experiences, such as art therapy or talk therapy, where you're able to meet yourself. The other place we can reflect is, of course, alone in our journal in Artmaking. And yet, as far as I can tell, That kind of insight comes from having a place to show ourselves and get some feedback. We think about communication with others. It requires you to be fully anchored in the present, connected with yourself, clearly communicating with yourself, knowing your boundaries, and then knowing the situation is now a good time to go talk to someone about a challenge? Or do you see that they're sitting at their desk very stressed out? Maybe now is not the right time. So we consider environment the context. We want to give our very best communication to the people we love. And often what happens is we do our best at work or out in the world somehow, and then we get frustrated more easily with the people we're closest to. And that's not okay. So we want to be our very best at communicating with others. To do that, we have to have the foundation, of course, of boundaries. As I mentioned, self insight and a high level of self-care. To be a good communicator, you do need to be like, well slept. You need to be in touch with yourself, well rested, and have those boundaries in place. Once those are there, you want to consider how you are able to communicate to others and how you are able to receive. So communicating to others involves timing. It involves knowing what you want to say. It involves having your emotions under control and knowing what your values are. If you're agitated and upset and you feel this urgency to say something that's negative or critical, or you have to just get something off your chest, I guarantee that is not the right time or place to go talk to someone. It's essential that you as a person are calm, cool, and collected and you know your message very clearly that it comes from your values, not from difficult emotions. Urgency is the number one sign that you need to wait. It's the opposite of what you want to do. But waiting to communicate has saved me so many problems. If I am more clear, I do a much better job being clear to others. When you're receiving communication from other people. Being well rested is also important. Knowing your boundaries. what you're willing to accept. And being in a place where you're not preoccupied with what you want it to be, but you're preoccupied with what's happening. If someone's saying something that you dislike, you want to respond to what they're saying instead of responding to your emotions of, I don't like this. This isn't right. You want to respond to what's happening, not what you wish was happening. And if that's the one thing you get out of this episode, I hope it's that responding to what's happening instead of what you wish was happening. We'll save you a boatload of trouble going forward. Being able to receive communication does not mean you are open anytime to receive feedback. It means you can say, hey, I'm too tired. Can we talk about this later? Or I'm really preoccupied with something. Can I give you my full attention on another day? It's respectful to you, and you communicate to you before you can hear anything from anybody else anyway. Communication is one of those things that maybe you took a class in college, maybe not. But you are an expert in communication. It doesn't mean we all do it right all the time, but we understand communication. It shapes exactly how we express our ideas, how we connect, how we collaborate. All of this revolves around communication. How you communicate is according to psychology, influenced by your personality, your background, and your creative mindset. We can learn to communicate more effectively. We can always take a class. You're listening to this class. You can be a part of a group. You can get inside the modern creative woman. Use your creative communication, your visual body language, communication, your verbal communication and timing to your own benefit. That requires a little bit of attention and making sure that you are developing your skills as a communicator. Over time. We don't get better unless we practice, unless someone helps us or coaches us, or we learn from experience. Communication also involves those personal limits that we set to protect our emotional, mental, physical well-being. These are our boundaries, and communicating them to others is essential. Many women who grew up in um, houses where they either experienced abuse or they ended up in, um, the the feeling of not being listened to, recognized or heard will not develop at the right time those boundaries. And then they wonder later on why they're struggling in so many interpersonal situations. Well, it's time to update your education around communication, that inner and outer communication. And remember, boundaries are what help us define how we relate to ourselves and others. It matters tremendously in how we communicate. I've talked about this a little bit before bridging communication and bonding communication. So if you think of a bridge and I'm picturing the Golden Gate Bridge, because that's the famous bridge right by me. And it connects two pieces of land, the water underneath that space where the ocean water flows into the bay. That's called the Golden Gate. So it's the Golden Gate to the San Francisco Bay. And so over top of it is the Golden Gate Bridge. And what we find is it's anchored on one side in San Francisco, the other side in Marin. It's not very well anchored into the earth. There's beautiful tall girders that keep it supported. And that is bonding the bridge to the Earth. Think of that as bonding, communication. It's getting really close to things. The edge of the bridge and the edge of the land. The bridge is what spans that. It connects to far away places, and it allows people to move easily from one to the other. Think of that as your bridging communication, where you want to reach out to someone who is different, has a different perspective, where you see perhaps something different from them and you want to communicate with them. It is how we connect different groups together to work together, to collaborate. So bridging and bonding. Let's get into some of the details that bridging communication gives you the sense of openness. Building common ground. Here's a couple key communication aspects that are about bridging. Being an active listener. Being very curious about what's happening, if you're not curious about what's happening in a conversation, means you're wrapped up in your thoughts and it's just not going to work if you ask open ended questions. That's a hallmark of bridging communication. When you're curious, you say, how come? You say, tell me more? You ask for clarification. The benefits of bridging is it fosters innovation, collaboration. It can reconcile our differences between groups of people. It's how we connect with our partner after a disagreement. It's encouraging expansive thinking and diverse perspectives. And as you know, having many perspectives is healing, creative and advances the situation so much faster than a single perspective. If you wanted to be bridging, you would ask, what else could it be? What else might be true besides what I believe? You begin to incorporate diverse viewpoints into your discussion, because you know that diverse perspectives bring a richness to your understanding. And another thing you can do is use analogies and metaphors to just link things that might not go together. Here's a game you can play. How might this be like that? So you can be out on your walk and say, how might this walk be like a book? And you can run through your mental library and say, oh, this walk reminds me of The Hobbit on his walk. Or this walk reminds me of moving through the desert. There's so many ways that you can make anything relate to another thing. And if you practice that over and over, you're going to get more and more creative. So try that exercise as often as you possibly can. How? Mind. This car ride be like a movie. How might this plant be like an artwork? Anything you think of to pair unrelated things is going to increase your ability to do bridging communication. Now Emma Thompson has a great quote on communication. She says any problem, big or small, within a family always seems to start with bad communication. Someone isn't listening. So we have to be in the right mood to listen. Yeah, the other person has to be in the right mood to listen. And we have to be open to hearing. And hearing more than mere talking is really helpful for communication. So that second kind of communication, the bonding communication, is when you want to strengthen your emotional connections, you want to increase trust. And the focus is on empathy. You're validating someone else's experience so that you can understand it. Before you give any kind of disagreement or conflict, you want to understand it. So some of those key aspects would be emotional presence. That means showing up fully anchored in the present moment. That's the kind of stuff we do the first week of every modern, creative woman month long class. We focus on presence, making contact. Bonding. Communication also uses reflective language. You say I am curious. You don't say you are wrong. You say, I'm curious. Help me understand. And when you're doing bonding, you want to create safe spaces for this authentic expression, both safe for you and safe for the other person. It means being respectful. The benefits of bonding is it really is building a deeper personal relationship or a professional relationship. And it enhances any kind of collaboration that you're doing. It's great to bond with your neighbors. It also increases your resilience in creative terms. And so bonding with others allows you to feel stronger, feel more connected, feel more trusting. And that opens up your creative capacity. So some strategies there are just practicing active reflective listening. You can rephrase your feelings and ideas. You can explain it to yourself in a couple of ways. If you're preparing to talk with someone. You can rephrase what someone else has said and say, is this right? Am I catching it right? You can share personal stories, which really helps bonding through trust. And you can validate emotions, both your own emotions, your own wish in that moment and the other person's experiences, and not jump to judgment and not jump to advice. If you are a parent, it is very tempting to give a lot of advice. If you withhold that and just wait for them to ask or bring up something. You're going to be in a better spot. They're going to be receptive to it. And you're not just. Doing bad communication by lecturing. They're asking for it. All right. So when you want to integrate all this information, the dynamics of this kind of communication, right. Bridging towards others, expansive, inclusive, it's idea focused. Bonding is really intimate. It's empathetic. It's relationship focused. And you want to use bridging if you want to brainstorm, if you want to innovate, if you want to work in cross-disciplinary projects, if you want to be friendly with your neighbor, you got to do a little bit of bridging. Bonding is great for like team cohesion, for emotional and romantic relationships, mentoring, emotional support. So your key takeaways bridging opens up that innovative and cross-disciplinary conversation. It allows you to connect to people with whom you are. Different is really important right now, especially in this political environment in the United States, that we are able to bridge to meet people in conversation in meaningful ways. Bonding is building trust. It deepens emotional connections. And that's where you want to find your allies who are able to support you in what you're doing. Able to join you if you want to speak up about things going on in the world. Both are essential, and they're both necessary for effective collaboration in your work and in your personal lives. And I want to remind you that you can do both with the same person. If you are in a disagreement with your partner. You're in good company because there's a whole field of psychology devoted to couple connections. And the Gormans are a couple that are the leading experts in research on this area. And they talk a lot about being able to make a bid to connect and being able to receive that bid to connect. You know, if someone in your life asks you, what do you think about this? Or, hey, look at the moon. That's a bid to engage and you want to respond. They also talk about approximately 70% of our disagreements in a close relationship are not resolvable. They're about personality or habit or style. And so in those examples you want to bridge. If one of you loads the dishwasher like an architect and the other one loads the dishwasher like a raccoon. You got to bridge that space and be nice to each other. Neither one of you is going to change. It's just a thing. It's a style. It's a thing that's needing to be bridged. Bonding. We do the same thing. We want to deepen our relationship with our loved ones and connect on a more intimate level. And I know, have a wonderful rest of your week. Now that you know about how to use your creativity. What will you create? Want more? Subscribe to the Modern Creative Woman digital magazine. It's absolutely free and it comes out once a month. And I know you can get a lot out of the podcast and the digital magazine. Yet when you're ready to take it to the next level, I want you to know you have options inside the membership. And if you're interested in a private consultation, Please feel free to book a call with me even if you just have some questions. Go ahead and book a call. My contact is in the show notes and you can always message me on Instagram. Do come find me in the Modern Creative Woman on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest at Doctor Amy Backus. If you like what you're hearing on the Modern Creative Woman podcast, I want to give you the scoop on how you can support the podcast. You can be an ambassador and share the podcast link with three of your friends. You can be a community supporter by leaving a five star review. If you think it's worth the five stars, and you can become a Gold Star supporter for as little as $3 a month, all those links are in the show notes. Remember to grab your free copy of the 21 Day Gratitude Challenge. The link is in the show notes and you can find it at Modern Creative Women. Com. Have a wonderful week and I cannot wait to talk with you in the next episode.