Unfiltered Communication
Transcript
Ericka Thomas 0:04
Hi there, everyone and welcome back to The Work IN. I'm your host Ericka Thomas. And I'm really, really excited to be here with you today. Because this is the first episode that is being recorded in my name is space. So I wanted to just begin today by saying it's going to sound a little different, and you might hear some strange noises in the background some clicks, some squeaks, maybe some footsteps. It might sound a little bit echoey for a bit, and that's because I am coming to you from a house that was built by a gentleman in 1850. And this man was a one of the sons of the founders of this particular town in Ohio where I live now. And he also happened to serve as a Ohio State Representative as well as in some capacity for Abraham Lincoln. And I just find it so rewarding to be sitting in his office. speaking to you today. And if that means there's some clicks and imperfections in our sound quality, I think I think that doesn't matter so much. I think it's more important that we all are able to be in a place of presence, and a space where we can really be in joy and that is truly where I am right now. So I'm just asking you to extend a little bit of grace to me as we iron out any audio quality issues going forward from here on out with the podcast.
Now, having said that, Today's broadcast is going to be a little stripped down version two to what we normally have when we are together, but I wanted to highlight some things that came out of our episode last week, and my interview with my good friend and yours Colleen Jorgensen and we had such a fantastic conversation. Colleen and I, I just really really enjoy talking to her and I feel like we are always on the same wavelength when we get together and and so I wanted to really kind of expand some of the things that we talked about. And we talked a lot about communication. Colleen is a real expert in a type of communication instructors can use called pain care aware. And not only does it help instructors speak to their clients. But what I found so interesting is that the more we can emphasize and develop our skills and communicating with other people, the stronger our inner awareness is of how we communicate with ourselves.
And I spent some time last week in a live webinar on LinkedIn with heroes rising and I was really really grateful to be on a panel with another really strong female entrepreneur named Arlene Washburn and her emphasis her focus and her business is is a science based dating service and she helps people find really solid, true relationships and a big piece of relationships as we know any relationship whether it's romantic relationship or a friend relationship or within our family relationship is how we communicate. It is absolutely critical that we cultivate a deeper understanding of how what we say to other people, affects them. And how would they say to us, affects us? This is what we call co regulation.
And yes, it's verbal communication, but we are also communicating with our body language with our energy and that comes from directly comes from how we are connected to ourselves how we are aware of our own body's reaction to what's happening around us, and then how we translate that information that awareness into an understanding of what's going on. Now, a lot of this happens instantaneously and very, very subconsciously. In the body. We are almost never aware of this communication within the body unless we really make mindful purposeful, intentional attention to those things as they come up in the body. And really kind of becoming more curious about what that means.
What does it mean when you can feel those butterflies in your stomach in a certain situation, for example, or what does it mean to you when you start to kind of feel your own pulse may be coming up in the neck? Or what does it mean when all of a sudden you're halfway through a sentence and your throat kind of closes up and you have to clear your throat. If we can bring more awareness to those physical reactions in the moment that we have with other people. We can start to kind of de code our own bodies, internal, maybe sort of called this intra personal communication that we have with ourselves. And once we can understand that once we can notice these things that come up and start to understand that now we can start to give our nervous system, our body, our self, some tools to deal with some of those things that can help us rise to the challenge when our nervous system is activated. And also to kind of turn down that fight switch so we can come out of that activated state quickly, easily, maybe more gently, and then we can find this beautiful balance that happens between that challenge and success.
We talk about that, that line that edge when we are in some kind of physical class, whether that's a workout, whether that's a yoga class or something like that. Riding that edge between challenge and success and physically. Maybe that's an easy way that you can wrap your head around that but we need that same edge of challenge and success in other areas. too. We need it in our emotional balance we needed in our mental balance our mental resilience, and we need it in this communicative state. When we are really truly communicating with another person when they are understanding us and when we are understanding them. And this goes away beyond just the words we use. Okay, although that is a really, really important piece. So let's start there, but start with the words we use.
Communication is a key skill that every instructor needs to be successful as any kind of professional. And really, this goes for anyone who's not an instructor. Also, I think we get into really a lot of trouble because most of us have not spent a lot of time learning how to communicate effectively with the people around us. So this translates beyond just for instructors who are trying to teach something. But it's really important when you're talking about the words that you use to understand that the words that you in particular are going to use to explain something may not be familiar enough to the people who are in your room or are in front of you, for them to understand you so this I will just tell you an example. So I was on a phone call a coaching call. And it was a business coaching call and I will say that this person was many, many steps ahead of me on that business learning curve. And they were using words to ask me questions in a way that I had no comprehension of, and we're both speaking English. I understood the words but I did not understood the stand the meaning at all because he was coming from a completely different place than I am. And maybe you've had an experience like that to where you can have a long conversation with someone and really not understand with any kind of clarity what it is they're talking about. Until someone explains it in a different way. Just using different words. Now we can take a lesson from this as instructors so that when we design our cues, we use maybe the same cue, the same idea in several different ways say it several different ways. yoga instructors, I think are really they fall into this trap of beautiful language, right. I've had people come up to me and say, Oh, that was just what you said was just so beautiful. And I've had other people say, I don't really know what that means. So we have to be very careful.
So that is one piece to our communication, right? Pick the words that you're going to use and then really stay in the moment. So the second piece we want to stay very aware and present with the person who we're speaking to, or the people if you're talking to a room, get confirmation of understanding of feedback, right this is sometimes we've talked about this as kind of reflective communication where somebody says something to you, you can put it into your own words reflected back to them, so that you can be sure that you've understood them correctly. By asking that question back. We need to encourage our students especially to do the same thing for us. Because there can be much lost in translation, right?
They have a filter and you have a filter, you know what you want to say? And then you have this cognitive filter that what you want to say goes through before it comes out of your mouth. Hopefully you have a filter, right? And then what you have said out loud goes through their filter and their filter is the same as yours based on their experience. And so their experience and your experience colors those words right so we need to stay very present. Okay, so we've got this, choosing our words carefully.
And then we've got this filter, this experience filter and so we want to stay present and very aware of how they're reacting to what we say how we're really reacting to what they said. And now we can start to apply some of these same things the same pieces to ourselves first and let them sort of overflow into other areas, whether that's your classes, or maybe it's just your everyday conversation with your friends and your family. Okay, so here's what I'm talking about. So in our conversation with Colleen, we talked about using some really positive language we talked about taking all of the negativity out of our phrasing out of our words, and I will tell you, it is so surprising if you try that if you start to try to do that.
You will be very surprised at how much of our language is already wired towards the negative. People in general are already wired to the negative this is a survival response right? Say no first that keeps you safe. But if we are trying to remove all the negative connotation like the word no like the word don't, and shift how we speak instead of you do this, too. Let's try this. When we start to do that, there is a shift that happens not just in the person you're talking to but within your own self. There it becomes there becomes less room for the negative. We just piece by piece phrase by phrase start to replace negative thoughts and destructive thoughts with these positive ways to frame things. It's not an overnight quick switch thing but it does happen. So as an instructor, if communication is one of the skills that you are trying to build with your clients, or between your clients, applying this no negativity now here I've already I've already broken the rules right because I said the word now. So we want to try to remove
any thing that could be read as negative, okay, because the other person hears every word like that, and only that negative piece, and most of us are coming to the table with some shame with some baggage and we don't want to as instructors reinforce any negative thought patterns that our clients may be showing up with. Right? We are trying to replace those negative thought patterns so that they can see better results. Okay, so that was one piece of our discussion with Colleen was removing some of that negative cueing, right. And you can do that no matter what format you're in. Even if you teach boot camp, you do not have to scream negative things at people. We don't have to yell at people with negativity we can yell at people with positivity. Once we have that shift from negative to positive on the outside, and then it starts to take root on the inside. And we become more aware of how our own internal communication starts to affect other people. In this CO regulation. We need to next really pay very close attention to how we are self regulating so that we can maintain that positivity in the face. of stress and challenge outside of us. So if we walk into the room, carrying around our own baggage right there on the surface, and something happens to scratch that thin skin, all of that lifetime of stress of trauma that we may or may not have recognized can just pour out of us we do not want to rain that stuff down on the people around us.
We are there for them. They are not there for us. We cannot use our classes as a way to punish ourself or as a way for our students to punish themselves. That happens quite often in the fitness industry. And the first step towards making your instruction trauma sensitive is to remove that punishment piece. Right? And so communication is one of those keys there. And I was so so grateful for Colleen to come into the podcast and share her expertise with us. It was just a phenomenal conversation. I really really hope if you missed it, please go back. She said some fantastic things about pain care. And pain in the body that really are eye opening.
And this is something I just want to just point out because she brought up the fact that you can be feeling pain in the body and have no tissue damage. And the same is true on the flip side. You can feel no pain in the body and be really injured and have there be a lot of tissue damage and so we want to understand that. That connection, that connection between what we are feeling in the body and what is actually going on in the body. That link actually comes from the nervous system. And understanding our own self regulation is really, really, really key there. And the biggest part of that is tapping into how we communicate, right. The foundation of our communication first within the body, then with ourselves and then with the people around us. And that communication can really change someone's life. So even if you only say one thing to your class, it could be the one thing that changes someone's day changes how they see the world. It's really, really important that we step away from some of our fear about what we say to people.
That fear can really cover our authenticity and prevent us from speaking the truth. Because we always always want to be honest with the peoples with the people around us with the people that we're serving. We want to be truthful with them. And sometimes. Now, I would say all the time, it's impossible to tell the truth if you're afraid to offend someone. And I believe that's a quote from Thomas Paine so I'm not I don't want to steal that but it is a great truth about communication, right? We want to be authentic with our with with our people, but also with ourselves. And so let's not be afraid. Let's not be afraid to speak, but simply learn how to do it better.
So with that, I want to thank you for joining me in my little space on the work in and before I go I want to share with you a couple of upcoming things to watch out for our sponsor elemental kinetics.com is going through a rebrand and that is coming up over the next couple of weeks. So I am really excited to share that as well and I wanted to mention it here so you don't get confused. Because our URL here on the working will change slightly too. But if it goes smoothly, and according to plan, and nothing it's not sideways or upside down or backwards. Or any of those things, then this should be a seamless shift for everyone.
So with that, I want to thank you again for joining me and be sure to check out Colleen’s interview from last week. She was amazing and coming up on the work in we are going to be shifting our focus to money mindset. So I'm really really looking forward to that. Money is a big stumbling block for a lot of us in the fitness industry. So stay tuned. And remember, it is totally okay to stop working out and start working in. Take care everyone and I'll see you next
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