Fit To Communicate: How To Get Heard In A Noisy World by Jenn Morgan

Introduction

It doesn’t matter if you’re a billionaire or a bum, technology has infiltrated all our lives. It has created a wedge between us and our connections with each other, leaving us emotional starved, professionally disconnected and overwhelmed by the constant flow of information -- even as our attention spans appear to be shrinking even further. And while marketers will tell you to shorten your message into bite-sized chunks for different platforms and communication styles, if you’re not fit to communicate in the workspaces and marketplaces of today, then it’s all essentially a waste of time. Technology has made connecting with other people more complex. It's has democratized mass communication by giving more of us access to tools to reach people across the globe at a low cost. More people having this kind of access means more messages are being sent out into the social sphere, creating steep competition for attention. All these contributing voices, and the devices to deliver them, have amped up the type and level of information, changing the way we interact with one another, the way we focus our attention and how we organize our day. Even the best communicators are challenged by new media. So much of it is novel and it’s in such a constant state of flux, that as soon as you find something that works, the platform rules change or your market finds a shiny new platform to play on. With everyone battling for attention and working hard to get ahead of change, there is little extra time to actually listen to what’s being communicated and then respond in an effective way. Sure, there are plenty of data-graphs and metrics to help convey all this information, but interpreting their meaning is still an art form. There are no rules for how to deal with this much communication. The most common advice is to turn off your cell phone. Ignore your email. Shut down your tablet and laptop. Create white space.

But none of that helps you deal effectively and efficiently with day-to-day sensory overload. It influences how effective we can be, gets in the way of accomplishing our goals and limits our ability to exploit technology to to create a desirable future. One of the biggest complaints I hear from my clients is in their personal lives. Their partners, spouses, friends, children – even grandma -- are talking to them with their faces firmly planted in their smart phones. Gallup research indicates that the average adult is actively disengaged from the work he or she is doing. That means a whopping 70 percent of your friends and family are emotionally disconnected from where they send over 80 percent of their creative energy. But while you can’t escape it, you can control how you respond -- how you increase your communicative fitness and rise above the noise to connect with another person. This paper will focus on the art of effective communication, how to get your point across amid all the distractions and the secret to inspiring people to engage in your call to action in any communication channel.

Attention span: going, going, going…

When I was growing up in the 1990s, the only way my friends could communicate with me, apart from face-to-face conversations, was by landline telephone, the beeper I carried after school or by passing me a note between or during classes. By the time I was in college, we were using email to communicate. By the time I graduated, my friends and I all had cell phones. Over the past 15 years, the way I communicate with my friends, clients and work colleagues has become more complicated. I get far more text messages than voice calls to my cell phone. I am introduced to new people via email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and dating applications far more often than in person. And, I find myself spending my lunch breaks having conversations with multiple people at once as I pop in and out of myriad social media zones to keep the momentum going. Research shows the average person switches between three diﬀerent gadgets more than 20 times an hour and that the average employee checks his or her email inbox every 1.5 minutes. Some 79 percent of people, ages 18-44, have their smartphones with them 22 hours a day. And, while there is still conflicting information regarding the range of our attention spans, studies show a 50 percent reduction overall. One study revealed that between 2011 and 2013, the attention span of the average adult shrank from 11 seconds to a mere 5 seconds -- 4 seconds less than that of a goldfish. With so many options for communicating and so much information bombarding us throughout the day, our lives have become filled with noise. Now, in addition to doing our jobs, we must slog through everything that is coming at us and set priorities – what we put oﬀ vs what we need to

address right away. This is time consuming and stressful. And as we sort it all out, we are finding it increasingly diﬃcult to communicate with other people. That’s because they, too, are battling information overload, with everyone and their grandmother’s kitty-cat videos vying for their attention. As a communicator, you have an increasing number of variables to consider if you want to rise above the din to get your message out. And you have no control over most of these factors. Technology will continue to change and evolve. And really, that’s a good thing. But we will only benefit from that evolution if we learn to use it to our advantage. Before we can do that, however, we need to learn how to better communicate with one another. And before we can do that, we need better understand how to communicate with ourselves. So, ask yourself this: Am I fit to communicate?

Deconstructing Eﬀective Communication

Let’s remove technology from the equation for a second to discuss and look at the basics of effective communication. Communication is a meaningful exchange of information between two or more people -- a collaboration, if you will. It’s not about having a perfect message. It’s about having an effective process for connecting with others, inspiring them to participate in the exchange and managing misperceptions along the way. Your goal is to duplicate your idea in their minds. To do that you need to inspire the other person to be open to what you have to say and then send back a response that helps you determine if you were effective. It’s important to recognize how important the other person is in this exchange. You cannot be effective without their participation. And, you can’t control others and what they pay attention to. But you can control how you show up and deliver your message. Here’s how to create an effective communication exchange:

First, figure out what your value proposition is; Second, strategize an approach to deliver information that inspires participation; Third, craft your message; Fourth, send it out; Fifth, interpret the feedback to determine if it matches your intention; Repeat;

To do this well, you have to consider the needs of the other person and why what you’re saying matters to them. You must also consider what you’re really asking for and why it matters to you.

Without taking the time to identify and organize these components of your message, you will struggle to connect to the person you want to reach and fail to deliver a message that accomplishes your goals. That’s because people make decisions emotionally and then try to rationalize those decisions with their minds. If you aren’t clear about why what you are “saying” matters to the other person, then the words you choose won’t capture their attention. And depending on your relationship with them, you might get feedback on what they think about what you are saying, but you won’t get the kind of engagement that helps you leverage their knowledge to move your idea forward. This is a sales performance skill. If you aren’t clear about what you are asking of them, the other person will be confused and won’t open up and share information with you. And the more of their time you take up, the more annoyed they will become and look for ways to escape the conversation. This is the reason collaborating with others can feel like a chore and meetings can feel like torture. Your lack of clarity is triggering negative emotions in others. As the instigator of the communication or the facilitator of the meeting, you need to be mindful of other people’s time, and share your intention right away, so they can figure out how to focus their attention and assist you in achieving established goals. This is a time management skill. If you aren’t clear about what you’re really asking for and why it matters to you, then you aren’t going to be able to accurately interpret information others are sending back to you. You will be too attached to your idea to manage their perception of you and that idea because you will overidentify with what they are saying and feel like they are somehow invalidating you. This will manifest itself as noise that distracts you from achieving your objective. This is a brand awareness skill. Remember, you cannot have a meaningful exchange with another person if you aren’t mindful of the message you are sending, because words mean diﬀerent things to diﬀerent people. If you say something without considering its impact -- without considering the words you choose and the tone you use -- you’ll communicate a message but it won’t be the one you intend. You cannot get a message across to someone who is not open to receiving it. You also can't force a person to open up and listen to you. You can only influence them with the way you deliver your message. Therefore, you need to be mindful of what you are saying and how you are saying it. Not

because you are trying to be politically correct but because you are seeking someone’s attention. Their attention equals their time and their time equals money. Attention is a currency in the modern market. Take one of my clients; I’ll call her Nedra. She had recently been promoted to senior vice president with a $3.5 billion pharmaceutical company. It was her job to look at the company’s projects and forecast potential problems that could slow the pace of products to market. She discovered a marketing problem with a vendor, checked and double-checked her work, looked up other options and then set a meeting with the SVP of marketing, her peer within the company. In that meeting, she told him what he needed to do to fix it. Nedra believed she was being confident, clear and extremely helpful. So she was shocked when he stood there stoned-face and said nothing. So she set a meeting with their boss, where my client repeated her concerns. And her boss turned to her equal, the SVP of marketing, and asked him what he thought. He said, “There’s no problem.” So the boss said, “Well, OK then.” Three years later, there was indeed a problem. What she had predicted, did indeed come true, and no one remembered her warning. Worse of all, she was the one who had to clean up the mess. In the end, Nedra was right and her peer was wrong, but it didn’t matter. Part of the responsibility was rooted in how ineﬀective she was at communicating with him. First, she wasn’t clear about his needs and therefore didn’t know why what she was saying would matter to him. She assumed he’d do the right thing for the company. People who have achieved a certain level of status within an organization, such as SVP, have learned to manage their reputations and what other people think about them. So, if you fail to create space for them to contribute their expertise in a way that makes them look good, they will be reluctant to participate with you because it could potentially be political suicide for them to do so. Nedra needed to help him save face within the organization and she didn’t do that. Second, she wasn’t clear about what she was asking. She had been looking at this project for a few months. She’d spent weeks thinking about its future. The more time she had invested in discovering the problems and analyzing solutions, the more confident she was of her idea. She thought she was asking him to choose a diﬀerent vendor, but really she was telling him what to do and then seeking his applause and appreciation because she spoke up. And when he didn’t respond the way she wanted him to, she started to push. The more certain you feel about

something on which you are not getting your way, the stronger your instinct to be pushy and try to prove your point of view and control someone else and their actions. Remember, you can’t control others, only what you say and do. The truth is that even though Nedra had identified a problem, she couldn’t fix it without her colleague’s participation. So although she believed her solution was the right thing for him and the company, she didn’t account for his needs, she didn’t create the room for him to manage his reputation and contribute his expertise with authority. Finally, Nedra was not clear to herself about why she cared about the actions she was asking him to take and why it mattered to her. She had a huge investment of time in this project and if her prediction was correct, she’d be left to deal with the fallout. So, she wanted him to take an action because it would be beneficial to her and her agenda. She felt certain that this was the approach. Plus, Nedra was new to her position and wanted to be recognized for her expertise from her peers. Not only was she asking him to take an action based on her findings, but she was asking him to admire her for it, too. When he didn’t respond in a manner she expected, she assumed it was because he didn’t respect her. Technically speaking, Nedra had a strong value proposition. She was clear about what needed to happen and why. The problem was her approach and, therefore, her delivery. To create an eﬀective message that others will engage in, you need to consider what matters to you and others and use that information to inform your strategic approach. In other words, you need to be mindful of people's needs. Otherwise: • You come across assumptive and send out all kinds of unintentional messages. In that instant, the only way to be eﬀective is to run people over with your agenda. It’s like you’re playing a game of basketball with a teammate and instead of passing the ball so that you are both working it toward the basket, you knock him to the floor on your way to make that fancy jump shot. But, you don’t even realize it because you are so caught up in the spotlight. When you forget to consider their perspective, they won’t feel included and you don’t connect. • Or, you become so focused on yourself, over-identifying with your ideas and what others think of you, that you can’t hear the message you are delivering, let alone hear what the other person is

saying in response. It’s like you’re so busy crying in the locker room about whether you’re going to be good or not, that you never make it out onto the court and your team ends up forfeiting the game because there were not enough players. When you forget to include your feelings, you sabotage yourself. In either scenario, your focus is misplaced. It’s good to know your value proposition and communicate it powerfully. It instills confidence in your listener. But, if you take the time to shape your message to pro-actively address concerns and clear up assumptions, people will trust you more. It’s normal to experience doubt and fear. But don’t ignore your emotions or try to avoid dealing with them. Instead, listen to them and use them to inform your approach so when you are delivering your message, you are prepared for push back and can handle it with ease. Before effective communication can occur, you have to establish a connection with the other person. Human connection is emotional. Without that connection, your message will float into the ether as pollution. Nedra’s run-in with her colleague had already occurred by the time she and I began working together. She had hired me because, even though she had the job and credentials to prove she was worthy of respect, she was the only woman at her level in the company and felt she wasn’t getting it from key men within the organization. And she believed this made her look weak in front of her team. She wanted to better own her authority and have her advice be not just considered but sought from these male executives. In reviewing this issue with her, I asked, “Well, did you ask him for his opinion or for his point of view?” She said, “Why do I have to do that? Men don’t have to do that.” Nedra is an effective and influential business woman. She’s also a very confident woman and a great communicator. Each of us has strengths and weaknesses, and when you run up against those weaknesses, it’s easy to lose our cool and come across unintentionally disrespectful. That's what was happening with Nedra. She needed to be the leader and come from a place of respect before she was going to receive it from her peers. Maybe it's not fair. Maybe it’s a gender bias. But, none of those opinions changes the facts. To create a different experience, she needed to control the emotional weather of the communication.

While it’s true that often the rules, especially in business, are different for men than for women, it’s also true that effective communication requires participation from both sides. A confident communicator proactively creates the space for others to contribute their points of view. It’s not about always knowing what to do or having the right answer, but rather about setting up the right environment so that other people can and want to engage in what you are trying to achieve. We spend time during Confident Communicator training learning how to do this. It includes writing value propositions, brainstorming strategies and creative approaches, giving and receiving constructive feedback, disagreeing with someone’s assessment and sticking up for yourself without losing your cool. We also work on innovative ways to create space for different personality types and we even help you identify your own communication style. These skills are much easier to focus and build independent of your actual work. Think of it as communication aerobics. By moving your expertise and projects out of the way, we can tap into your natural self-expression, expand your range and then help you stay present and engaged when you are feeling like you just want to run away. Learn more about The Confident Communicator three-day workshop at www.jennmorgan.com/theconfidentcommunicator

The Primary Muscles of Confident Communication

Over the past five years, I've personally coached over 65 executives and entrepreneurs through brand identification. I’ve learned that everyone wants to be Radically Distinct (my company name) and yet, everyone has a personal struggle with revealing that part of themselves. It’s a legitimate identity crisis. Culturally speaking, we've spent the last 100 years learning how to sit down, be quiet, get in line and do what we’re told. That mentality drove the industrial revolution. It took us out of the fields and into the cities to build our current business environment. To fit in and keep our jobs, we needed to follow the rules. To be Radically Distinct is to embrace the opposite side of the status quo. It means you stop trying to look and act like everyone else and start standing out as uniquely you and shaping your path based on the value you bring - independent of what you do. This requires an entirely new skill set. These are the two muscles you need:

- Emotional resilience — courage to receive information and stay centered in who you are in the face of uncertainty, doubt and feeling overwhelmed;

- Brand Mindset — ability to create, shape and manage the perceptions of yourself and others;

Emotional resilience When you stand out and voice your opinion in opposition to the status quo, you will be both a hero and a target. You’ll be a hero to those who have something to say but haven’t yet mustered the courage to say it. And you’ll be a target to those who benefit from maintaining the status quo. When this happens, you have to be willing to hear feedback without shutting down and closing off. You have to be open and receptive to the information coming back, even when it’s uncomfortable, so that you can own your position and respond powerfully in the moment. If you recoil, if you back down, you will affirm that the only way to be successful is to shut up and do what you’re told. If you engage, you will affirm that the path to success is speaking up for and making decisions based on values – not what’s politically expedient. But how you respond is also important. You can't just start screaming at people and expect them to listen to you speak your truth. You need to be responsible with your feelings, clear in your intention and deliberate with your words. To do that, you have to come from a place of mutual respect and have the courage to stand alone when no one has your back. The only way you will do that well is if you can trust that you will show up for yourself even if no one else does. That's called emotional resiliency. We are sentient creatures who experience the world through our senses. Our emotions or feelings are messages sent from our bodies to our minds so we can make sense of the world around us. Feeling nervous, sad or happy means that you are in touch with yourself and your surroundings. That’s a good thing. People withdraw from experiencing their emotions for the same reason they recoil from conflict and rebel against feedback. They don't have an effective process for dealing with themselves and their inner voices when those things are taking place in the the moment and afterwards. Their selftalk conversations can get so intense and debilitating that it causes migraines, neck pain and many other physical conditions. I’ve worked with many high-profile people who don’t even realize this is happening. That’s because, it’s the norm in western culture to desensitize ourselves to our emotions so that we can get ahead in business. When you recoil from feeling your emotions, you are disconnecting from an aspect of yourself that connects you to yourself and to others. Overtime, this becomes your go-to behavior and you lessen your courage to get out of your comfort zone and express yourself fully.

As long as you are afraid to feel what you feel, you will struggle to connect with others because you are avoiding those precious moments upon which relationships are built. When I have an argument with someone and we work through it from a place of mutual respect, then I know them better, we have a deeper connection. And I trust them more. The same is true for inner conflict. If you engage with your emotions and work through them when you do something that embarrasses or upsets up, you’ll develop a deeper connection with yourself. And, therefore, trust yourself more. I know this sounds like therapy. Many people have told me that I’m like a business therapist because I include emotions in our conversations much like a coach or counselor would. That’s because the most important aspects of developing a branding strategy for my clients are embedded in the doubts and conflicts they are having within themselves. The only reason they are having those emotions is because of their unique perspective. If I ignored that, I could create a great brand strategy that my client would be unable to execute. Think of yourself as a communicative instrument. You are in charge of the music you play. You need to keep yourself in tune so that the information you send is what you intend and the information you receive is accurately interpreted. Your emotions are like strings on a guitar. When you resist playing one of them, you limit the range of sound you can create. Then when you do play that string, you have no familiarity with it and aren’t sure if it’s a sound you like. And, if you don’t like it then you don’t play it well and it doesn’t sound right to others. When you engage with your emotions, you are actively accepting yourself for who you are. This gives you more capacity to stay open and receptive to information being sent to you, giving you greater range of self-expression to help you respond with clarity and share your point of view with confidence. Emotional resilience is your ability to adjust your emotional state to remain in harmony with the goal you are attempting to achieve. This is a skill that I teach on Day 1 of The Confident Communicator training workshop. The idea is to build a relationship with your internal voice, using a personal practice that helps you organize your thoughts and experience your feelings while staying connected to yourself and open to hearing others.

It helps you stay physically present and at ease when confronted with challenging situations. That’s important because communication is physical. You can’t effectively get your point across if you are stuck in your head or thinking about other things. You need to be 100 percent available and in the moment to keep your energy focused and centered under pressure. Think of the alpha dog in a pack. He is the alpha because his energetic presence dominates and his actions lead the group. It’s not intellectual. It’s physical. Communication is physical. To get your point across effectively amid all the distractions, you need to be 100 percent available and in the moment to keep your energy focused and centered under pressure. From this position, you can effectively send the message you intend. In my three-day Confident Communicator training, you’ll learn an exercise called the Zipper Technique to help you stay physically present and emotionally engaged in these situations. It’s a physical exercise that you can use to master your personal energy and stay calm when being confronted or challenged. This is a tool that Nedra uses to keep her cool when she needs to have difficult conversations with her direct reports and to confidently challenge and persuade higherranking executives. Learn more about The Confident Communicator three-day workshop at www.jennmorgan.com/theconfidentcommunicator

Brand Mindset

Take the index finger of either hand, point it out and put it on your nose. Try to look at it. Can’t really see it, can you? Now, keeping the same finger pointed, extend your arm straight out in front of you. It’s now much easier to see your finger, right? You can’t accurately see yourself because you are too close. You can see inside looking out at the world and you can see how others respond to you. But you can’t see yourself independent of your own perspective. Even when you look in the mirror, you are seeing a mirror image. You aren’t seeing you the way the world does.

Read any self-help book or listen to any guru all the way back to Shakespeare and you’ll learn to know yourself and be true to that self. But, how do you do that if you don't have an accurate perception of who that self is? In my experience, people spend so much time trying to be authentic and to fit into a little box of what they think that perception is, that the world can't see who they really are. This creates a distorted self-perception because you know who you are, independent of what others think of you. But when you show up and their response doesn’t align with what you think of yourself, then you do one of two things: 1.

Start adjusting yourself and morphing who you are to trigger the response you want to get from others. I’ve certainly done this. I have one of those popular personality types that others either love or don’t. On the one hand it makes me really good at what I do. But when I was younger and less sure about that part of myself, I could easily find myself acting in a certain way to get people to like me.

2. Reject everyone. Who cares what they think? I am who I am. If you don't like me then I don’t need you. I’ve done this, too. It's the artist rebel in me that wants to reject anything that isn’t original, just to prove my independent nature. To truly be authentic, you need to give yourself room for your personality quirks to shine through. How you perceive who you are and what others think of you, largely dictate how you show up in the world. So, if you want to show up diﬀerently, then you need to change the way you perceive yourself and your experiences. That’s not the same as changing what you believe. Your beliefs are thoughts you have based on your experiences. You can change your beliefs and still struggle to change your results because you've only changed the way you think. As I mentioned before, humans make decisions emotionally. So, to create a diﬀerent result, you have to change the way you feel about what you are trying to do. When you change the way you perceive yourself and your experiences, then you change the way you relate to yourself and that changes the way you feel. With these new feelings you can create new results.

I once had a high-level client whose job was to bring clients to his company. He was an avid golfer but never talked about that passion at work or with his clients, because he felt it didn’t belong there and that no one cared about his personal life. But I showed him how leaving his passion at home, meant he showed up dull and uninteresting to others. This new self-perception gave him the enthusiasm to implement the strategy we designed. He transformed his networking experience from something he hated to something he enjoyed. In two months of working with me on his personal brand strategy, he accomplished his three-month financial goals and made an extra $30,000 doing so. Read his story at www.jennmorgan.com/dan-the-planner Your passion is emotional energy. It is the feelings that you hold about yourself and your life that attract people to you or push them away. When you bring in aspects of your personal life into your work life for the purpose of connection and relationship-building, people can relate to you easier and you are then able to direct more energy into how you show up. But, you can't do that if you don’t know how to shape your self-perception in relation to the market you’re after. And, you can’t create an accurate interpretation of yourself on your own because you can’t see yourself from the outside looking in. A brand mindset is a design thinking methodology that helps you consider who you are, what you are trying to achieve and the roles you need to play in order to accomplish your goals. It helps you lay all these pieces out. And then, working alongside a thought partner, co-create a strategy that plays to your strengths and builds your brand with a distinctive style and voice. (Learn more about my brand class at www.jennmorgan.com/personalbrand/ A brand mindset gives you a strategic advantage in business; it helps you get over your selfpromotion anxiety. Instead of focusing on whether you can or can't do something, you focus on how uniquely suited you are to do it and then work out your doubts by strategizing your approach like a pro. By shining a light on the unique value you bring to each setting, you uncover the position from which to craft messages that include your unique experience and create room for others to participate in your point of view. Here’s what I mean. My client, Renatta is a confident and competent woman and a leader in her community. She had been building an event-planning business for five years. But while her business was growing, she wasn’t contributing significantly to the household’s financial goals. She decided to set her business aside for a while and take a job to help bring more money in. She was confident that her skills as an event planner would transfer into the job role of project coordinator,

but she wasn’t sure if potential employers could see it. So, she hired me to help her position herself and her skills in a manner that recruiters could see her value and want to get her employment. Her resume was very well written but it used general terms like ‘good people skills’ ‘detail oriented’ and ‘strong relationship builder’. The first thing we needed to do was to transform those words into a value proposition that described what those skills could do for the businesses and people she’d be working with - within the role of project coordinator. This process raised her level of self-esteem because it gave her a new lens through which to perceive herself and her personal value - independent of her job. With her new brand mindset, she knew what her communication, leadership and entrepreneurial skills would do to benefit others. This is what it means to know your brand. It means to expand your self-perception -- to grow it beyond the way you see yourself today -- so you can change the way you feel about what you are capable of doing. Then we had to work on her interviewing skills. Even though she was great with people and had a lot of experience being on the stage, she got nervous when it came to self-promotion. I asked her how she felt about promoting herself. She had never thought about it, but as she did, I watched her body grow tense. She told me that in the past, when she told people what she likes about herself, they would get all weird. So, she developed this habit of editing herself before she spoke. She’d think about what she wanted to say, then about what others would think about it and then end up saying something completely different. I had given her three main selling points to focus on, but she still needed to improve her ability to deliver the points in an interview. That meant we had to retrain her body to feel comfortable and expect a different outcome when she confronted an experience that in the past didn’t feel good. I designed a work-out program for her to practice when out with her friends, taking note of when she was self-editing and then making a different choice. And she did it. Within a week, she was having conversations with her closest friends that she had never let herself have before, conversions about what she really thinks and feels and how hard it is to share that sometimes.

For Renatta’s friends, this new side of her was a breath of fresh air. She, after all, was the one everybody looked up to - the emotional leader - the one who always seemed so perfect. To know that she is vulnerable and doesn’t always have it all together, drew them closer to her. These conversations built her self-confidence. They showed her that being herself was OK and that people wouldn’t get weird when she was authentic. By the time she showed up for her first job interview, she had a bunch of these experiences. She was speaking with the president of the company, someone in a position who in the past would have intimidated her, and she felt selfassured. What’s more, he perceived her as an equal when he said, “Well you know how it is, right? You’re a business owner.”

Emotional resiliency helps you execute your strategic plan. When you build these communication muscles, you increase your ability to stay open, receptive and centered in the face of uncertainty, conflict and feeling overwhelmed. When the spotlight is suddenly on, you can handle it. You have the wisdom to listen in, the confidence to speak up and the focus to get your point across with clarity.

Conclusion

The amount of information coming at us is evolving at a dizzying pace. The only way to cope is to become more selective with our focus and more discerning about how we spend your energy. But to do this we must find a way to think of ourselves as communicative instruments who are in charge of how we respond to the stimuli surrounding us.     Many people cope with this overload by simply ignoring it, turning it off - much like they try to desensitize themselves from their emotions in the business environment. The more you try to ignore it, turn it off and become immune to it, the less you are able to utilize it to achieve your goals. And, before you know it, you have a society of workers who are no longer emotionally connected to the work they’re doing.    It’s time to stop faking it until you make it and relax your power pose. Effective communication requires a willingness to step out of your comfort zone to exchange information with another person. You have to be open and receptive to feedback if you want others to open up and consider what you have to say. To do that, you have to have the wisdom to know when to listen in, the courage to know when to speak up and the confidence to try a different approach.

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