Emotional Communication

I’ve been reflecting a lot about how I communicate, how it impacts other people and how other people’s communication styles makes me feel.

I love communicating and learning from different people and sharing my thoughts so I can get self-confidence that I can continue to develop in both my personal and professional life and build stronger relationships with people.

This describes my approach to communication with everybody I meet “To effectively communicate we must realise that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communications with others – Anthony Robbins”

?Sometimes I get it right and sometimes I get it horribly wrong. ?Historically I considered a conversation that had gone wrong as a failure, but having been introduced to an acronym of fail (First Attempt In Learning) by Lisa Robyn Wood I now recognise such conversations are an opportunity to learn.

?As I have become more self-aware of who I am, which forms of communication I am most comfortable with, and what works better for the people I want to build emotional relationships with, I realise in person and video calls work best for me.

I’ve thought long and hard about why this is the case and also considered the difficulties we had as a family communicating with my Mum and Mother-in-law after they were diagnosed with dementia. I realise, for me, the key is non-verbal communication.

In understanding why non-verbal communication was so important to me, ?I found the 7-38-55 model of communication developed by the psychologist Albert Mehrabian in the late 1960’s. His theory describes how body language communicates 55% of our emotions, with just 7% described by words.

We all appreciate somebody who is an active listener, and it’s their use of body language that tells us somebody understands us.

?Interestingly, he highlights the other 38 percent of communicating your feelings is through your tone of voice. This is something I hadn’t recognised at all. But, in reflecting, I recognise certain tones of voice and accents automatically engender a specific response in me.

Indeed, I found the coaching feedback given by Read.ai , an AI powered meeting productivity tool, gave me very insightful feedback after initial meetings with people. Its factual impersonal analysis of my listening versus talking time and its identification of conversations which gave positive engagement have helped me to develop my communication style.

So, why am I writing about this in my newsletter?

Well, having just finished Alzheimer’s Awareness month and presented as part of the ethical discussion on The Long Goodbye I feel, we need to increase our self-awareness of how we use all our communication styles and wanted to hear other people’s views.

Specifically, I feel we all need to recognise how our body language and tone of voice, impact the people around us. But, perhaps most importantly, we need to ensure we take the time to actively listen to people’s feelings through observing their body language and recognising their different tones of voice.

But, active listening is not enough, we need trust and act on the feelings of the person and not simply discount and ignore them because they have a diagnosis of dementia.

?Perhaps if we actively observed and listened to the 3 communication styles of the dementia community by interpreting 55% of their non-verbal communication, 38% of their tone of voice and 7% of their words we would build a stronger emotional understanding of dementia and reduce the discrimination reported by 88% of people diagnosed and living with dementia.

For me words are a great start, but they are not enough. Observation and interpretation of non-verbal communication and listening to a persons tone of voice are the keys to really understanding how people feel.

If we don’t understand how the person feels, how can we possibly enable and empower them to live their best life with dementia? ?

As an aside, any ideas of my non-verbal communication in my photo? ?

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