SHARMAS COMMUNICATION SKILLS-Actions for Effective Communication

Actions for Effective Communication

Action6. Express more appreciation. To build more satisfying relationships with the people
around you, express more appreciation, delight, affirmation, encouragement and gratitude.
Because life continually requires us to attend to problems and breakdowns, it gets very
easy to see in life only what is broken and needs fixing. But satisfying relationships (and a
happy life) require us to notice and respond to what is delightful, excellent, and enjoyable,
to work well done, to food well cooked, etc. It is appreciation that makes a relationship
strong enough to accommodate differences and disagreements. Thinkers and researchers
in several different fields have reached similar conclusions about this: healthy relationships
need a core of mutual appreciation.

Action7. Make better communication an important part of your everyday life. In order to
have your new communication skills available in a wide variety of situations, you will need
to practice them in as wide a variety of situations as possible, until, like driving or bicycling,
they become “second nature.” The seventh action is to practice your evolving
communication skills in everyday life, solving problems together, giving emotional support
to the important people in your life, and enjoying how you are becoming a positive influence
in your world. This action includes learning to see each conversation as an opportunity to
grow in skill and awareness, each encounter as an opportunity to express more
appreciation, each argument as an opportunity to translate your complaints into requests,
and so on.

One deeper level of this seventh step concerns learning to separate yourself from the
current culture of hatred, animosity and violence, and learning how to create little islands of
cooperation and mutuality.