Transform from passive to active communication in three steps.

Passive communication is no joke. It impacts the evolution of your business if you're a business owner or your professional growth as a leader; including promotions. Passive communication also impacts your personal growth, relationship maturation, and your mindset as you're living life in a victim mentality.

As a former passive communicator; I promise, passive communication should not be your go-to move. It won’t get you where you want to go. Your ‘niceness’ and compliance will feed your sense of hopelessness and fill your tank of resentment.

Yes, if you’ve read any of my previous articles, posts, or watched my LinkedIn lives; you will quickly learn I previously lived in aggressive communication. Truth be told, my go-to communication style prior to aggressive communication was passive communication. I guess you could say I’ve run the scale on communication styles.

Here’s the scoop. When you are passive in how you communicate; you also assume others will step in to take care of you, stand up for you or save you, eventually. In fact, even with the grand ideas you have; you assume someone else will come up with the idea because if you thought of it, then anyone else would too.

When you passively communicate, you also accumulated a long list of activities where you comply, acquiesce, or keep your mouth shut for the greater good. Now, you expect that others will pay you back because you’ve done the right things and they owe you.  

Truth be told, whomever you have that uncommunicated contract with; still doesn’t know what you want or need because you’ve NOT communicated exactly those needs or wants, opinions, desires, or grand ideas.

When you don’t ask for what you want or need, or share your grand ideas no one knows what you want or need or what you are capable of doing.

When you are passive, you feel anxious and that your life is out of control. As I mentioned before, you will often experience feelings of hopelessness and often feel resentful (although you’re not probably unaware of it). 

Why? Your own needs are not being met.

Passive communicators will often: fail to assert themselves, allow others to deliberately or inadvertently infringe on your rights, fail to express your feelings, needs, or opinions, and tend to speak softly or apologetically exhibit poor eye contact and slumped body posture.

Personally, I too experienced all of these things. And when I couldn’t take it anymore, I would explode. More often than not, my reaction was out of context to the situation. 

Unfortunately, this isn’t uncommon. And that most difficult part of the experience as a passive communicator is that you think about what you want or need and you even WISH for people to just do what you want or need. However, you can wish all you want and until you take action, your wishes won’t come true OR you will spend a lot of (wasted) time wishing until they do come true. 

Importantly, what you do next is key to improving your skills at asking for what you want and need. 

First, start small. 

Choose something that has low importance and work your way up. For example: let’s say you like almost every kind of food and never express your opinion about meals made or restaurants in which you establish. Use the next opportunities to practice speaking up, giving your opinion and using those experiences to collect information about what others say about your opinions and take inventory of how you feel.

Second, allow these opportunities to make better decisions and not be a slave to your emotions. 

When you are passive; you are also slow to make decisions because you are waiting for others to do for you. And when they don’t do what you want or need them to do, you get emotional, upset, hurt, resentful. When you notice these feelings, acknowledge them, remind yourself you are a good person for having needs and go back to step one.

Third, Identify the behaviors and patterns that are getting in the way of speaking up for your wants and needs.

Did you have an aggressive boss who made decisions for you and the team? Or maybe a partner or parent who never asked for your opinion. Or maybe you believe you need permission to speak up. Whatever it is; reflect on the past situations that inhibited your proactive behavior and active business and life engagement. Remind yourself they are events, not required lifelong behaviors. And then go back to the first step and take action.

No matter who you are, there will always be certain situations that will prove to be more challenging than others; especially when you ask for what you want or need. This is true both in business and personal. The worst-case scenario is usually, NO. The best-case scenario is almost always, YES. When you don’t ask for what you want or need, you are telling yourself no; instead of the person(s) with whom you want or need something. You’re not even giving them a chance to say yes.

ABOUT

Stacy is an executive communication coach working with small to medium-sized business owners and executives as a trusted advisor. As an individual with a big title and deep problems to solve; the complex business challenges and impact on your personal life are overwhelming. Every CEO needs a trusted advisor with which to process those challenges and reclaim their life. Book a call and let’s talk. bit.ly/chatwithstacy