“If you are making music for other people, you will have to be aware of how people relate to it.” ~Ken Hill
Continuing on the topic of “other awareness,” here are two more ways to improve your capacity to notice your impact on the people around you—remember, you’re exercising your connection muscles—so as to become a more effective, productive communicator.
Practice soft talking
On a physical level, soft talking means bringing both the volume and the pitch down when speaking on your phone or to another person in the company of others. Some people try to have sensitive or difficult conversations by lowering their voice volume, but the pitch is equally as important.
So, too, is speech speed. Practice slowing down your speech speed when you’re upset or irritated, or when trying to really understand what someone else is desperately trying to communicate to you. That’s when frustration shows and our ‘other awareness’ flies out the window, and we can end up saying something we wish we hadn’t.
Again, soft talking Is about developing an other awareness. It’s not about changing the way you speak all the time, just some of the time.
I believe that modeling is all that matters when you’re talking about communicating with other people. That woman sitting across from you on the bus ride home having a loud conversation isn’t going to change the way she talks on the phone based on any looks you give her, indicating she’s talking too loudly and is interfering with your bus ride.
In fact, eye rolling and tsk-tsking are generally not only ineffective, they’re counter productive. I mean how do you feel when someone shoots you one of those withering glances that indicates you’ve done something terribly upsetting but they don’t speak up, don’t tell you what it is? If it’s a stranger on a bus, it probably won’t have much of an impact. But if it’s your boss or colleague? Whew! That can wreck your day. Hell, your week!
On an emotional level, soft talking means turning down the internal volume on your self chatter that is constantly responding to what you’re hearing and seeing around you. You are bombarded with 80 billion bits of information every single day. In a single interchange there might be 40,000 things that you’re processing in a moment, 37,995 of which are unknown to you, they’re happening below the surface unconsciously. But they’re influencing your decisions.
When you are a part of a conversation, soft-talking means being aware of you’re your internal chatter is crowding out your ability to truly hear what the other is saying and to bring you back to focusing on them, not you.
Practice soft walking
I mean this literally: become aware of the sound, force, and impact of your footsteps.
Most folks walk heel toe, heel toe. I’m asking you to intentionally walk toe-heel, toe-heel. Makes you sort of glide. The point of the exercise is not to walk this way all of the time—you’d look like a frustrated dancer at best—but to choose to walk more softly some of the time.
Like when you’re family is watching a movie and you enter the room, thump, thump, thump, and plop down on the couch.
Or when you’re walking down the hall at the office and see two people, heads down, speaking in lowered voices, obviously engaged in a communication they deem important and somewhat sensitive, soft-walk by them. It’s a sign of respect. It’s a way to show you notice them and respect their space/energy.
There are lots of ways to apply soft-walking and soft-talking during the day.
Improving your ability to have a positive impact on more people takes awareness of the impact you’re exerting, even when unaware.
