Communication is at the heart of our success. Think about it, nearly every job revolves around communication in some form. In fact, we communicate so frequently that we rarely give it much consideration. But we’d be far better off if we did. How we communicate influences everything, from how effectively we build relationships to our level of well-being.

That’s why it’s so important to understand your communication style and build skills that elevate your ability to present ideas, listen effectively, and work collaboratively. All the intelligence in the world won’t help you if you can’t get your point across and genuinely connect with people.

If you’ve ever felt uneasy sharing your ideas, expressing a differing point of view, or addressing conflict you know that communication isn’t always natural or easy. The truth is human skills are hard and people are complex. And if you want to become a better communicator, you need to be able to understand yourself and others.

Get To Know Your Communication Style

It’s impossible to improve your communication skills if you aren’t able to accurately see how you communicate. This is why discovering your communication style is so important. We sometimes fail to recognize what we need out of a conversation. And, we all have blind spots around how we come across and impact people. Your style profile gives you an in-depth look at the needs, behaviors, and preferences that make your style effective and sometimes challenging.

Every communication style has a range of expressions that spans from healthy (on our best days) to stressed (on our worst days). The goal is to gradually move your autopilot mode (how you act day in and day out) toward the healthiest expression of your style and narrow the gap between your actions when you’re healthy and stressed. That way you’re at your best more often than not.

Given that we’re all unique, it’s important to learn to recognize, specifically, what your style looks like when you’re communicating from health and under stress. Pay attention and you’ll become more aware of the behaviors, emotions, and physical reactions that tell you when you’re moving from a healthy expression into a more troublesome stress response.

Learn To Recognize Your Style Under Stress

Once you figure out what your tells are you can learn to choose to intentionally respond rather than allow stress to unconsciously drive your reaction. Some styles have big swings in behavior that are easy to recognize and others are subtler. Some people notice a shift in their emotions when feelings of frustration, impatience, or anger arise as they’re shifting into stress mode. Others receive physical stress signals––rapid heartbeat, holding their breath, a flushed face, or a desire to flee––when stress starts to build. You might have multiple signals.

WHAT ARE YOUR TELLS?

Here’s a simple reflection practice to help you strengthen your ability to recognize when you’re expressing yourself in health or under stress.

To begin, take a piece of paper and draw a line down the center to create two columns. Label one “Healthy” and the other “Stressed.” Go back through your style profiles and write down five (5) behaviors or key phrases that reflect the way you show up most often when you’re at your best in the “Healthy” column, then do the same looking at how you communicate at your worst in the “Stressed” column.

Once you're aware of the behaviors for your healthy and stressed style expression, you want to learn to recognize the flags that signal what level you're communicating from. To help you get specific, picture a situation where you were communicating from health, then from stress, as you reflect on:

Thoughts: What's running through my mind?
Emotions: How do I feel?
Physical Reactions: What are my body’s signals?

As tempting as it might be to make your list on a computer, I strongly encourage you to write your reflections down on paper. The sheer act of writing slows down your mind and connects you to a deeper level of style insights. It forces your brain to mentally engage with the ideas in a way that encodes them into your memory and strengthens recall. Perhaps most important, handwriting sharpens your critical thinking and ability to connect the dots, since you process the information as you’re recording it.

Make Healthy Communication A Daily Practice

Healthy communication isn’t a code you crack, or a life hack, that once discovered keeps you in this expression. Elevating your self-awareness and building communication skills happens by degrees and over time. You have to consistently and intentionally practice consciously communicating until it becomes second nature and simply who you are.

Make healthy communication a daily practice:

Daily practices work best when you start small and build. Moment by moment and day by day, you’ll evolve and learn to communicate at your best even under stress. And through the microevolution of Self, you connect to more and more of your potential.

Set an intention each morning to communicate at your best.
Choose 1-3 of your healthy style behaviors to intentionally use that day.
Check-in throughout the day to see how you’re communicating.
Carve out 5-10 minutes at the end of the week to learn through your experiences.

Humanity could certainly use more healthy communication. So, how about we all make it a practice to intentionally bring out the best in ourselves and one another? I’m in!

Happily,

Maryanne