Conscious Communication Skills in Business
The greatest challenge for anyone in business today is how to make a personal and professional impact in an increasingly competitive, volatile and unpredictable marketplace.
This means that taking an integral approach to communication skills will be fundamental to success.
At 4D Human being our team of ‘4D Integral coaches, trainers and facilitators’ combine the knowledge, expertise and talents of entrepreneurs, business leaders, psychologists and actors to offer a unique suite of communication skills training programs, workshops and seminars to help individuals, teams and organizations to
‘Consciously Create The Impact You Choose.’
A core aspect of our work is using acting and improvisation skills because we firmly believe that drama training is preparation for life.
The tools and techniques actors use in training help them to master their own 3D (physical, emotional and cognitive) human experience. They train by working integrally with the lines, levels, states and stages of body, heart, mind and soul. This includes personal energy, body language, emotional intelligence and the cognitive ability to learn, understand and deliver complex texts.
They then need to be able to untangle their consciousness from their own feelings, thoughts, intentions and behaviors in order to embody an entirely different person’s life conditions. This could be described as a ‘non-dual’ capacity to fully embody a character on stage, while simultaneously witnessing themselves doing so.
In performance they need to take the I, You, We and It perspectives. Feeling, thinking and acting while also objectifying their feelings, thoughts and behaviors so as to guide and manage what is happening both intra-personally and inter-personally in the WE space with the other actors. All the while working within the environment of the stage or studio and maintaining what we as the audience experience as a genuinely moving, entertaining and authentic portrayal of a character.
To do this they have to expand their ability to consciously create the impact they choose. This leads to the development of the 4th dimension of human being. The Intentional dimension. This is the realm of consciousness, energy, creativity and at the deepest level, the causal field.
That’s as close a description of a practice to support and align with Frederic Laloux’s call to observe the Teal disciplines of developing Evolutionary purpose, Self-management and Wholeness as we’ve ever heard.
About the workshop
Title of the Workshop: Conscious Communication – An Integral approach to communication skills in business
Conscious Communication starts with understanding yourself in 4Dimensions
- Physical,
- Emotional,
- Intellectual and
- Intentional.
All within the 2 contexts of Environment and Shared Culture. Firmly rooted in the AQAL model, the 4D2C route map serves as the foundation of this experiential and dynamic 4D integral workshop.
Drawing on skills from theatre, improvisation and psychotherapy this workshop is designed to help escape the general barriers and bonds of expected business behavior, old unhelpful patterns and interpersonal blocks.
It is a fun, interactive session in which we share insights and techniques to consciously co-create unique, meaningful relationships from a second tier perspective – in life and work.
These practical – and often transformative – tools will help you communicate with confidence, clarity and conviction and emotionally connect with people around you – even in the toughest of moments. In other words to – CONSCIOUSLY CREATE the impact you choose – every day.
Stagescript
INTRODUCTION and INTERACTIVE DISCUSSION
The 4D2C model highlights the interconnected nature of the dimensions of the individual, the team and the organization and how these components create a system that generates physical, emotional, intellectual and intentional energy. We can describe this interconnected, energetic system as the individual’s ‘Field of Being’ (FOB), which is the basis for how we relate and co-create with others.
- BODY LANGUAGE & THE FOUR LEVELS OF GESTURES – Research has demonstrated that in everyday, interpersonal communication, people spontaneously generate images via hand gestures to accompany their speech. In this way they help to encode the speech into the listener’s memory by utilizing two cognitive aspects: words and images.
- EXERCISE – The physical act of moving our arms and hands generates energy within our bodies. The higher the level of gestures we make the higher the level of energy we release. But there is also another hidden effect of gestures involving the brain.
The psychologists Rizzolatti and Arbib (Language Within Our Grasp 1998) have established that when we perform an activity such as gesturing, we activate motor neurons in the brain. Curiously similar neurons are also activated when we merely watch an activity. These are called mirror neurons. - When we watch someone moving, mirror neurons fire off in our brains and we not only witness a gesture, but also experience and feel the gesture in our minds. Watching gestures or any movement literally creates an energetic reaction in the brain. This is why watching people dance can be a contagious and emotional experience, sometimes compelling us to express ourselves.
This suggests that gesture can expand the effectiveness of verbal communication by increasing not only cognition and levels of meaning available to speakers and listeners but also their energy levels.
By consciously using specific gestures to accompany your speech you can enhance your communications, raising not only your energy but also the energy levels of those who watch or interact with you. - PERSONAL ENERGY IN 4 DIMENSIONS – Developing an engaging, flexible communication style is not a mystery; it’s simply the intelligent focus of higher levels of personal energy expressed in specific behaviors. An engaging person is someone who operates from a place of courage, commitment and conviction – CONSCIOUSLY using all 4 energetic dimensions of human being. In other words, a person who exudes a high level of positive energy!
EXERCISE
Be ever mindful of which of your four dimensions are the most and which are the least energized, so you can calibrate and manage your energy input and output. Becoming aware of where we use, and express, the most and least energy can help us to understand where the deficits are. It can also help us to see where the balancing and tipping points reside. A person who is highly energized Intellectually but expressing no Physical or Emotional energy will create a different impact from someone operating from the Emotional and Intentional (belief) dimensions.
Also be aware of the quality (positive or negative) of your energy. Remember that a person expressing High Energy – Negative attitude (H-) is highly contagious.
H- High Energy Negative Intention and Attitude: eg. Aggressive, Bullying, Intimidating
H+ High Energy Positive Intention and Attitude: eg. Motivational, Encouraging, Inspiring
L- Low Energy Negative Intention and Attitude: e.g. Draining, Depressing, Slow
L+ Low Energy Positive Intention and Attitude: e.g. Calming, Good Listener, Empathetic
Managing the quantity and quality of your personal energy is the key to developing an effective influencing style and a more engaging presence. The first step is learning how to calibrate and manage your personal energy and the first tool is the – Energy Status Scale.
THE ENERGY STATUS SCALE
ENERGY is Everything! Your energy can be measured and managed by visualizing a scale of 1-10. 10 being very highly energized and 1 being low and drained of energy.
IMPROVISATION
… is the ability to walk into the unknown with friends and colleagues and know you can make something happen, to say ‘Yes and’ to build on each other’s ideas so as to co-create something entirely new and unexpected, the knowledge that you have an endless source of creativity inside you and that something will happen, the courage to embrace ‘failure’ knowing that it is so often the very best creative gift you can be given, the freedom to walk into any arena and talk in front of any audience without a script and with only a core belief, the joy at knowing whatever a client, a team mate or an audience member throws at you – you have the skill to turn it into gold. From this place you are free from contracted, fixed values and free to flex and flow up and down spiral according to your audience.
These are some of the fabulous, life changing gifts that the art of improvisation can offer you!
EXERCISES & APPLICATION
- Integrate your Brain Hemispheres to be free to respond in the moment
- Yes so…build and co-create unique relationships in a whole new way
- Application to real-world scenario
- Word-at-a-Time – uncovering the patterns of needing to control a conversation and outcome and learning to let go and truly co-create a third entity
FURTHER AREAS EXPLORED:
PRESENCE – Conscious Leaders Consciously Create the Impact they Choose. Remember in every moment of every day you have the choice to consciously make the impact you choose. Even as you rush down the corridor from one meeting to the next, you can let your 3D body mind send you hurrying past a colleague or you fire up your 4th Dimension – your Intentional Self – and stop and face them and for 5 seconds tell them you’d really love to catch up with them.
THE NEXT 5 MINUTES – Every day and in every moment you practice what you will become. Who do you choose to be and what do you choose to do in the next 5 minutes that will build the next piece of who you are consciously choosing to become?
THE HEALTHY EGO – Your EGO can be a wonderful thing. The notion of ‘Ego’ has had a terrible bashing over the years. And yes, an unhealthy defensive or fragile ego can be troublesome. The goal, however, is to use all your fabulous Conscious Communication and 4D tools to develop your HEALTHY EGO. Strong, resilient, confident in your abilities and honest about your amazing talents – as well as available to growth, happy to receive constructive feedback, curious in the face of conflict and able to acknowledge mistakes with a clear mind and open heart.
YOUR OBVIOUS IS YOUR TALENT – We Human Beings can suffer with conscious or unconscious anxiety around our own abilities. Are we good enough? Do we know enough? Do colleagues know more than us? Sometimes we can undervalue our natural strengths, gifts and talents as we are so used to them – having lived with them all our lives – that they just seem obvious. Surely everybody thinks like this, can do this, has this quality. No they don’t. All your qualities – the good the bad and the ugly! – are what make you the wonderful, unique, exceptional, interesting expression of human being that you are. Your qualities may seem obvious to you but to the world they are new, different and needed. Don’t dismiss your obvious. It is only obvious to you. Your obvious is your talent.
REVIEW & REFLECT– You are a Human Being not a Human Doing. Co-Creativity and 4D Human Being isn’t just a training model. It can be a way of ‘being’. A way of life. Holding a ‘Yes And’ attitude and stepping into conversations and situations everyday in a state of conscious co-creativity – in all four dimensions – is an incredibly exciting way to live.
Presenter
Philippa Waller is a director of 4D Human Being. Bringing Conscious Leadership and Conscious Communication skills to leaders and teams all over the world – through highly engaging training and development, coaching, events, conferences and seminars. With a background in business, theatre, improvisation and psychology, Philippa works at all levels within organizations to help increase 2nd Tier awareness and implement vertical development for business leaders.