To Communicate Or Not To Communicate – It is your Choice

Yes. Whether ‘To communicate’ with someone about something OR ‘Not To Communicate’ is your choice. Mindset – The factor that really decides the choice we choose at a given point of time.

Mindset is nothing but ‘Set Mind’. Our brain has a wonderful ability to train and make decisions based on prior experiences. From birth our mind forms cognitive patterns based on information consumed through sensory organs. All those forms of communication signals is then converted into ideas and stored. This process happens every second and even in this process every human develops unique idea about communication & its components also. Everyone of us have our own definition for questions like – what is good communication? what is bad communication? who are all good/bad communicator in my scale? Whom I want to show as my examples? etc.

We show our idea about communication in every communication opportunity we encounter and even train (or fine tune) our ideas based on outcome of current opportunity. At one point of time in life, when we learn our communication is bad, we don’t really take the comments as it is. We try to defend with all our reasoning which I listed earlier post under myths & reasons that ruin communication development.

By the way, removing all negative reasoning in mind with positive reasons in one complete stretch is not possible – but it is possible in step-by-step way. Training of ones own mind & forming an idea (or pattern) requires long time, but once idea formed it is really long time to break that out. That’s why mindset can be termed as ‘Set Mind’.

Getting proper mindset is essential for communication. Now, the main question from you is “So what do you want me to do now?” Here I give just 4 pointers.

1. Rewrite your definition of communication in mind – To rewrite definition of communication, first you need to recollect what do you think about communication, purpose of communication, good and bad communications, different situations you come across in life, outcome of communication opportunity, your fears, your earlier victories, whom do you think good communicator and why. After recollection, write down which are all thing you do different from what you think as good communication – in this step try not to satisfy your mind by giving some reasoning for the deviation between what you think good and what you did as it may take you back to old state only. Remove the myths and restating the purpose of communication often will make the whole process of easing your set mind.

2. Work on deviations – What are you deviations? To you what you want to achieve and what you are currently doing. Main item here are – stage fear and fear due to status difference between you and people whom you like to interact. Most of the self help book on communication talks about it & most of its content deals around anyone of this – rehearsal, boosting confidence by seeing yourself in mirror, correct outfit, eye contact, body language (non verbal), making impact using different tones & powerful words (verbal), don’t be anxious, etc.

3. Make a best choice & right choice – One of the outcome of communication is ‘relationship’. Basic necessity of human race is living in a community which has foundation as good relationship with others. So making right & best choice in every communication opportunity is very important. Communication is like a two-sided sword. Balancing your communication at a given situation is very important to increase your success. Many time our choice not to communicate causes misunderstanding & even spoiled a great opportunity. On the other side, over communicating also create issues. One needs to know when to start when to stop – what to share what not to share. All these comes through experience and need to be consciously controlled by mind.

4. Don’t stop, repeat – If you felt your choice in previous opportunity was bad, don’t stop and stamp yourself as ‘Bad Communicator of the world’. Just go back to step 1 and rewrite your definition once again – work on your difference. Okay – if you felt your choice in previous opportunity is good, don’t stop there you need to repeat the same thing again and again in every opportunity as it gives you right result.

17 Essential Qualities of a Team Player by John C. Maxwell – Book Summary in Mind Map format

Here is the book summary of John C. Maxwell’s “17 Essential qualities of a team player” book. I tried presenting it in mind map format. Click the image to see the enlarged readable version.