Communication is your birthright. You are born into this world possessing all the powers you need to connect to your fellow beings and the world around you. You do not have to get in touch: you already are. You’re prewired for communication.
We each come into life fully experiencing, inseparably from ourselves, everyone and everything in every moment. As infants, we’re automatically connected to our world, even without language. A baby does not separate self from other. Watch how an infant stares at the shiny toys hanging from above its crib. See how the child and mother gaze at one another. No separation! This connection is the purest form of communication – immediate, total, direct. Communication is life itself.
Unfortunately, this natural connection blurs over time. Growing up and learning to see ourselves separate from everything else, we lose contact with our innate faculties. To reawaken these powers of communication we can use a little help. That’s what you’ll find in the following pages: guidance on how to release pent-up abilities for communicating – writing in particular – and living life in all respects more easily and instinctively: that’s fluency.
Whatever your occupation or role in life, the ten tools described in this book will help you to communicate with far greater ease and confidence. Since fewer and fewer people seem able to do so – especially through writing – communicating articulately gives you extra leverage in whatever you set out to accomplish at work, in groups, and with family and friends . . .
While seen through the window of writing, however, the powers described in this book point to something deeper: how to live a more satisfying life by expressing yourself genuinely and relating fully to the world and the people around you. In the process of writing the book, while examining my own experience, I realized that my insights about writing and communication apply to life more broadly. And when it comes to living, we’re each our own resident expert. We need only tap more deeply into our inborn talents.
From Chapter 6
Order Chaos
A to K: Eleven tips for getting clear
J – Get unstuck using “tricks”
When you find yourself with a seriously flawed or unsatisfactory first draft and you can’t see your way to fix it, here’s a technique (“a trick of the trade”) that helps me get unstuck. Go through your draft paragraph by paragraph and on a separate piece of paper list the subject of each paragraph using a couple of words or a short phrase – sort of like outlining after the fact. Reviewing this will help you to see where you’re stuck and what could work as a better organization.
As well, you’ll often find it far more efficient to rewrite something from scratch than to scratch your head for hours trying to fix something that’s bogged down. Your next draft will flow more freely. Try it.
You can also get unstuck with troublesome drafts and avoid being intimidated by large projects if you break them up into a series of smaller sections, much like you would tear up a slice of bread instead of shoving the whole thing into your mouth. Completing a project section by section gives you a sense of growing satisfaction. Moreover, you can skip problematic parts and return to them when, in the context of having the others done, things become clearer and the job, less daunting. Remember the old dictum “Divide and conquer.”
Yet another trick you can try if you’re stuck figuring out what to write or how to say something is to pretend that whatever it is – for example, a title, a visual image, or a whole outline – has already been created and produced. Close your eyes and picture the finished item in front of you. What’s the first thing you see? Don’t dismiss anything that arises. Use your imagination freely. You can employ this technique in any aspect of your life, whether you’re thinking of a dish to cook for dinner or imaging where you want to take your next vacation. Close your eyes and see what appears.
From Chapter 10
Trust Yourself
Being and Evolving One of the most effective ways to evolve as a human being is to continually deepen your communication. Learn to trust yourself – in fact, to find yourself – by finding confidence in your inherent ability to connect with your fellow human beings.
Just to give one example, when you begin writing something, after all of your research, outlining, and thought, put aside your plans and notes – and doubts – and allow yourself to write freely and directly. Turn off the little doubting, negative editor inside. Don’t worry about mistakes, contradictions, or awkwardness. Everything can be checked,corrected, and edited later.
Writing is like speaking your native language: most of the time, you don’t have to think what words to speak, they arise spontaneously, virtually instinctively – hence, fluently. Writing can work the same way. Let it flow. Trust yourself.
If you get stuck, don’t worry. As I’ve advised earlier, just skip the sentence, paragraph, or section you’re stuck in and go on to the next. You can always come back and fill in any gaps. Having a few gaps to fill is less intimidating than facing an entirely empty document. How to fill the gaps becomes clearer and easier when you’ve completed the surrounding material.
Skipping problems and returning to them later is a variation on the knack of giving yourself a break, pausing and turning your mind to other things rather than pounding your head against the wall trying to figure something out. We all have a tendency to be far too hard on ourselves. If we each took life easier, life would be easier for all of us.
Gaining confidence entails learning how not to be stuck – stuck in habits from the past, stuck in narrow thinking, bogged down in fears of the unknown. The secret to practicing being yourself and not being stuck is to live a full life, responsive to the world around you and to other people, as they actually are, now, moment by moment.
