INTRODUCTION
THINK OF THIS BOOK as a bravery manual that helps you turn risk into reward. It’s here to help you reach your potential as a communicator. There’s a world of wonder just beneath the surface of sending and receiving messages when you have a clearer view of what’s been tripping you up. It’s time to see what you might be missing.
Great communication is a full-body, full-mind, and full-heart effort. Communicate with Courage encourages you to ask yourself: “How am I perceived when I’m speaking and listening? What does my best effort look like, how does it feel? Where do I bring it to light? Who in my world gets my best tries at skillful, authentic communication? Who else might be deserving of that effort, and how so?” Courageous communication can create powerful wins for you and the people who matter most to you as you leverage risk, courage, and skill.
Let’s start by defining key concepts that make up the bones of this book.
COURAGE
Courage is strength in the face of fear. It means sensing what you’ll test out as a communicator might expose you to negative consequences, believing that some potential benefit (even if just to fortify your skills) is worth it. The word comes from an Old French word, corage, from the Latin word for “heart.” Courage allows us to live larger, to experience the world beyond our comfort zone. Courage means not giving in to doubt when you feel a longing to get in the game as a communicator. It’s curtailing negative self-talk, asking for feedback, owning your mistakes, expressing your feelings, addressing touchy subjects, and sharing credit. It can be called upon in innumerable ways and is one of the most thrilling gifts of being human. Its power allows us to take risks to reach our personal and professional potential despite obstacles that often show up as fear, ego, societal labels, and dysfunction in our workplaces and families.
Courage as a communicator is what you show when you apply for the job you know you may not be qualified for, risking rejection. It’s there when you ask the person you’re smitten with out on a date, when you stand to say a few words at a memorial service, or when you squelch gossip about someone who isn’t present to defend themselves. In workplace settings, courage is on display when you give an employee a more accurate lower performance review rating with genuine, constructive feedback instead of opting for an inflated rating to avoid a challenging conversation.
Communicate with Courage in title alone probably sounds like a book about saying more. But courage isn’t always about saying something. It can mean being quiet when you’ve got a remark teed-up for a laugh at someone else’s expense. It might be declining to share an answer to allow a less-experienced person to unearth their own. Courage can be found when tempering your reaction, letting another speak before you do, or taking time to get your head around information you receive when you give others the floor. Listening requires the more verbose to stifle impulsiveness and deal with the frustration of waiting to speak. Evolution as a communicator comes from engagement and just as importantly in some situations, from waiting to engage.
Courage is facing the Dark Side (I see you, fellow Star Wars fans), addressing dysfunctional aspects of communication in yourself, your colleagues, your work environment, your family, or even in your own strengths which detract from communication when overused. When you see someone publicly change their mind, admit some bias, own a mistake, or stand up for their own or others’ rights or feelings, you’ve seen courageous communication in play.
RISK
Communication choices have to be weighed against personal and professional costs. Ideally, potential loss should not outweigh potential reward. If you’re brazen in the way you deliver your messages and lose your job, we lose your voice (questions, ideas, praise, constructive criticism) in that setting for good. For example, I don’t always give each CEO the whole truth all at once when I offer advice about what they could improve as communicators. I usually want to continue to improve their organization’s culture with them and retain my role as advisor. So, I try to balance directness and respect for feelings in my delivery. Courage doesn’t always look like going all the way there with someone. You might need to test the waters, drop a hint, ask for an invitation to share your perspective, or think twice about how to word your message. You’re still summoning courage, and you stay in the game.
THE 4 HIDDEN CHALLENGES
The hidden challenges we’ll address are:
1—Hiding from Risk
2—Defining to Be Right
3—Rationalizing the Negative
4—Settling for “Good Enough”
They’re so important to reaching communication potential that they each have their own chapter ahead. Hidden challenges are sometimes (for me) less fun to talk about than courage and risk, maybe because they smack of “here’s another thing to do that’s not going to be easy.” It’s sort of like getting a weird spot on your skin checked out. Is this something that is going to require additional attention? I hope not. I don’t have time for this. And that’s one way to look at it. A better way might be: “This is an investment in my future self—a self that deserves the benefits of brave communication.” It’s achieved by facing risk, recognizing there’s much to learn beyond what seems the one best way. It’s achieved by looking at potential payoffs rather than focusing on what can go wrong, and pushing past mediocre. That’s what tackling the four challenges is all about.
If you want to address a hidden challenge, it helps to inquire within about what you feel as you unearth it. When approaching change, try to feel before you start to deal. Name the emotions that come up as you consider the hidden challenges. It’s likely you’ll notice there’s some anxiety mixed in with your excitement about what you might gain from a new strategy. Advanced communication techniques come more easily after you’ve acknowledged that facing a hidden challenge brings some discomfort. Otherwise, you would have faced it already, I bet.
PRO MOVES
Keep your eyes peeled for Pro Moves. You’ll see them sprinkled throughout the book with time-tested favorites concluding each chapter. A Pro Move is a communication attempt, a way to send or receive messages more deftly than the average bear. It’s a good try that might flop or that you might pull off with flying colors. Either way is OK. A Pro Move is a communication strategy others might see as involving too much trouble or skill to undertake, so they walk on by, missing a chance to get closer to their communication potential. Making a Pro Move requires passion for learning and a desire to improve your life, your surroundings, or someone else’s life. It often means you’ll use self- and other-knowledge in the action you’re taking or deciding not to take. For example, you know your preference when communicating is to do or say X, but you read a situation to call for Y, so you zig when you used to zag. Maybe you stand out, stand up, or stand down, but it’s not the easy choice. What is it, then? It’s the Pro Move.
EXERCISES
When you’re out to gain new skills, reading is good but doing is better. This book contains a real-life action item, a “to-do” at the end of each chapter. The exercises reinforce the chapter’s key content as they build your courage. Be patient with yourself as you work through them. Each will require you to stretch in a different way. The information you gather from the exercises will inform your future Pro Moves as communicator.