communication

The Ugly Duckling in the Modern World!

August 20, 2018 by @candesscampbell

“A Belief is just a thought you think over and over again.”

– Abraham-Hicks

The original post was in 2014 and I see that the meaning takes on new life with the political climate at this time and the major planetary changes and clearing that many of us are doing at this time. I’ve made a few changes in the content. Feeling angry, hurt, achy, tired, reactive and having a difficult time adjusting?

You are not alone!

In November 1843, the Hans Christian Andersen’s story, The Ugly Duckling was published in Copenhagen, Denmark. This amazing fairy tale has been read and re-read by adults and children alike, all over the world.

The story, as you probably know, is about a mother duck in a flock of other ducklings. The bird was teased and bullied unmercifully throughout his life, because he looked different and behaved differently. As an adult, the bird sought out and joined a flock of swans finding them to be beautiful birds. Although he expected the same abuse, the swans were open to his joining with them and they accept him. One day this ugly duck saw his reflection in the water and realized he was not an ugly duck at all, but really was a beautiful swan. He found his flock and fit right in. He was transformed.

Common to all of us is the desire to be heard, seen and understood. Many of us can relate to this archetypal story of not fitting in and finding ourselves teased, attacked or excluded. We continued to look for and hoped to find “our people”, our flock or our tribe. In the journey of doing so, we often changed our opinions or beliefs. Sometimes we gave up our voice and became silent, all in an attempt to fit in.

So often I hear someone telling another person what “the truth” is and insist on what they “should” be doing or thinking. Communication becomes about what is right or wrong. Opinions become polarized and those who do not agree with either the loudest voice or the group voice can be intimidated, shamed or alienated.

Over the years, the precious beliefs developed as young people get lost in the mass of voices and one’s self-esteem takes a hit. So often when working with clients, the undercurrent of their situation is a feeling of being unworthy or undeserving. How others have treated them guides their beliefs about themselves.

What would happen if, instead of stating your opinion and telling someone what you think, you asked the person to explain more about what they were saying? Wouldn’t it be interesting to see how your relationships change if you went into conversations with the sole purpose of understanding their point of view. How would your posture change if you were there just to receive, to just hear the story?

Join me in practicing Listening!

Now, there will be times to share your opinion and have debates of course, and to enjoy the fun and creativity of a dispute, but let’s change it up a bit. Think about a few people in your life that are important to you. Make a conscious choice to have a couple conversations with them where you just “hold the space” for their musings, for their sharing, for how they see the world. Experience them deeply. Look into their eyes and be present to them. Give them the gift of being heard, seen, and understood. Bring them into your fold and see them as the swan they truly are. Allow your loved ones to be transformed by the incredible generosity of your listening.

Self-Reflection and Amends Making

April 11, 2018 by @candesscampbell

Last week I found myself in a situation where I was talking with someone and I could hear my own voice. I sounded condescending and intense, with a tinge of anger. It was not how I wanted to convey my message and I felt helpless. At that time, I shared with this person that I could hear my own voice and my intention was not to be condescending, and for some reason I really couldn’t change the sound of my voice. I kept good eye contact to stay connected.

I was trying to understand what the person was doing and was in shock. It took me a couple of days of self-reflection to understand what was happening for me. What I realized was I was shocked by this person’s behavior. I could see the lack of basic skills. Later, I understood that my reaction was shock and also fear. I could not even imagine how someone that age would be unable to do simple tasks. Seeing the person lacking basic skills scared me because I felt responsible to help and I was overwhelmed by the scope of this.

The self-reflection helped me see my own over-functioning behavior and how I can choose to teach and help or choose not to do this. Once I looked at what was underneath my seemingly uncontrollable over-reaction, I called the person and apologized. I was calm and connected and it felt much better. Then I began to look at ways that I could empower the person and not rescue or shame.

The point of this story is that self-reflection is really important and many people don’t have the ability or desire to do this. Very few people take the time to self-reflect and look at how they behave. Because of that, very few people take the time to make amends. Making amends is different than just saying you’re sorry. Too often people say I’m sorry all day long and it has nothing to do with what they do, but is an automatic response because of low self-esteem.

Amends making comes from thinking over a situation and looking at, not only what you did, but also identifying your pattern of reacting. It is about understanding what triggered you so you can do better in the future. The other part of amends making is you don’t only say you are sorry, but you do something to make it better.

I called the person and said I am working on being more respectful and I will do better. In the next couple weeks I’ll do something special for this person to complete my amends making.

We all deserve to be treated with respect. We start by being self-reflective and then make amends. This builds your character. You also model healthy behavior for others.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Communication and ADD

September 26, 2017 by @candesscampbell

Have you ever listened to a friend and thought “Can she even hear herself?” We all have patterns of communication and behavior that we exhibit to the world. Sometimes you don’t even recognize what you are saying or doing is in direct contradiction to what you believe. Often you will notice someone judging someone else for the very behavior they themselves have! I see this often on social media.

I remember one day my daughter said to me, “Mom, you’ve said that before, several times.” Many of you know when I was 14 years old I had an accident that resulted in a Near Death Experience with head injuries. As a result of this I have experienced some memory problems. Another result of this trauma was I lost my sense of smell, which also influences memory. A positive from the accident is a definite increase in my intuition. When my brain was injured, my intuitive self took over and now much of how I access information is intuitively.

Unless you continually challenge your brain, you can develop memory lapses. Since my daughter’s comment, I have been working on being aware and not repeating myself as often. Repeating can happen for reasons other than memory problems and brain injury. When one has a history of not being heard or have not being listened to by others, they can develop a pattern of repeating. Saying the same thing over and over again can also come from a lack of self-awareness. It can also be an ineffective way of trying to heal an emotional wound. You may say the same thing over and over but nothing changes. It would be more effective to change your behavior by accepting a situation or changing your relationship with the problem; forgiving, leaving, setting boundaries and such. Saying the same thing over and over can also be a sign of ADD.

Have you ever had a conversation with a friend, loved one or a co-worker who often repeated the same thing and didn’t focus. Someone with whom you tried to create a plan, but politely getting them to pay attention, listen and commit to a time was near impossible? Instead they just kept telling you all the situations that went on in their day and you were not able to set a meeting.

So, how to do you communicate with friends, loved ones and co-workers that are ADD or have ADD
symptoms?

[clickToTweet tweet=”What are ADD symptoms?” quote=”What are ADD symptoms?”]

Listed here are some of the Inattentive Symptoms of ADD; not the Hyperactive Symptoms. This may help you to identify why you’ve had some difficulty communicating with someone. It can clarify why you may have felt frustrated and hopefully will give you some helpful communication solutions for yourself.

Inattentive ADD Symptoms

Careless mistakes/lack of attention to details
Lack of sustained attention
Poor listener
Failure to follow through on tasks
Poor organization
Forgetful in daily activities
Avoiding tasks requiring sustained mental effort
Losing things
Easily distracted

[clickToTweet tweet=”Get tools to communicate with someone who has Inattentive ADD.” quote=”Get tools to communicate with someone who has Inattentive ADD.”]

Depending upon how close you are to this person, you may want to research more about ADD and continue to learn.
Here are some simple ideas that may help.

Use emails as your primary form of communication to set up meetings. This way you can scan the email quickly for the details about the meeting.
Start your conversation with, “I have one minute to plan this meeting.”
When the person becomes tangential, politely bring them back to topic. “Oh, I’m sorry, I
have to go, when did you say you could meet?”
Give the person 3 clear choices of times.
Be willing to set a boundary.
If the person won’t be decisive, realize the meeting may not happen and move on.
Plan your communication with the person when you have enough time to go through the
process to get the meeting planned.
Have a plan B for your time so if their disorganization creates a last minute cancelation, it
won’t disrupt your life.

These are some ideas that may be helpful. Again, if this is someone you live with or a supervisor, I encourage you to find more information on this topic. One book you may be interested in What Does Everybody Else Know That I Don’t? Social Skills Help for Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder by Michele Novotni, PhD http://amzn.to/nxks8h

If you have another resource, please share with us!

Kyoto- If I can lift the rock my wish comes true!

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Resolving Conflict

September 6, 2017 by @candesscampbell

“Sure it hurts, but if you love someone, you forgive them.” Blanche “Some things you forgive, some things you never forgive.” Kate

– from Brighton Beach Memoirs by Neil Simon

Our current planetary conflict is a great backdrop for me to expound on how to resolve conflict and the pitfalls of communication. With all the floods and fires on our coveted planet and in our politics, I thought this would be a timely topic.

Here are some helpful steps.

Clear with this person on an energetic level.

Ground your energy. Here is a video that will teach you to do this. http://bit.ly/wBHJbh
You have an aura around you which is part of your energetic self. Imagine pulling your aura in around your body. Pull it in about 6 – 8 inches around you.
Focus in your heart and bring your attention out of the top of your head into the heavens.
Image the person there with you. At this level, send them love from your heart. You may also imagine sending them golden white Light from your heart.
If you can do this without anger or negative feelings, talk with them at this level.
Come back down, image yourself filling up with golden white Light and release any leftover energy down your grounding cord.

Steps to resolve conflict in person.

Write out the situation in your journal and then re-read it the next day. Sometimes it helps to do this a few times, so that you can become clear on what happened and what you want to communicate.

Become aware of your own part of the situation, even if you perceive it to be minor in comparison to the other person.

If you are angry, look at where you may be feeling hurt or fearful. These emotions are often right under the surface of anger. Feel your feeling and let them go. Journal them over and over if need be.

Contact the person you are having conflict with and use clear, direct, honest communication. I suggest you meet in person (not via text or email) because this allows you not only to read the body language, but also to open your heart.

Give the other person the chance to communicate their side completely. It is helpful to use the words, “I heard you say,” and repeat back to them what you heard and let them clarify. This helps them to feel heard. You can hear what someone is saying without agreeing with them. It is important that you hear.

Once the other person feels heard, share your side. They may not listen well and you may not feel heard. If that is the case use the broken record method. Continue to say the core message again and again, “I hear what you say, and ______.” Yes, that is true, and _______.” Do this until they are able to understand they are not hearing you.

Make a request of the person such as “My request is we put this behind us and go on from here,” or “My request is that we continue to meet and talk weekly until we can resolve this.” You can use whatever it is that you desire.

Trust your intuition, and use as many of these steps as you would like. If the person is not willing to meet with you or clear the situation with you, then move on and let it go. No longer allow them into your energy field and set healthy boundaries.

Sometimes people have a hard time clearing conflict because of negative communication patterns. Often these reactions were learned in early childhood as a survival response to a dysfunctional family. In this case they may triangle in other people to take sides, or become passive aggressive and rather than talking with you directly, they will be passive in their aggression in a subversive manner.

More will be shared about this in this communication series.

One of the books I recommend for healthy communication is Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg

You can find other valuable information in my Self-Help Toolbox!

Share your own tools in resolving conflict in your life.

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Your Thick Skull!

August 23, 2017 by @candesscampbell

I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs – when I was 17 – that I realized I was talking through an empty skull . . . I wasn’t thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts. Allen Ginsberg

“I can’t get it through your thick skull,” a character on a TV show says. What does it mean? Being a writer, I often listen for sayings and I wonder where they came from.

Have you ever talked with someone and shared with her as clearly as you can, and then she responded with something that had nothing to do with what you said?

Communication can be difficult when your head is full of your own thoughts. You are stuck in your own perspective and you can’t seem to find room for how anyone else sees the world.

What happens for all of us is we tend to defend ourselves by taking a stand on something. We see it our way, and close down our minds to other possibilities. In part, this can be a survival tool; to not become so sensitive to all that is happening around, and to just focus on our task.

In relationship though, this can be frustrating and derisive.

[clickToTweet tweet=”In relationship it is important to see each other’s point of view! ” quote=”Have you ever heard two people sharing with each other and you could see both sides, but they could not see the other’s point at all?”]

You may have seen old 1970’s TV rerun episode of All in the Family, with Archie and Edith Bunker. In this episode, they were discussing politics. Archie was irate when he found out Edith had voted for the opposing candidate from Archie’s. All he could see was his vote didn’t count. She had cancelled it out. They went round and round and he could not understand her vote had nothing to do with his. He would never understand this of course.

We all have this tendency to have a “thick skull” at times. Being a reader, I love seeing the world from other people’s perspective, especially other cultures.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Connection with others is so much better when we see situations from the other person’s perspective. ” quote=”Connection with others would be so much better if we all tried to see situations from the other person’s perspective. “]

This can be done in the privacy of your own mind. You don’t have to give up your position. Once you do practice seeing the other point of view though, it becomes easier.

You don’t have to agree with the opposing view, but being open to hearing it and understanding why one would see it that way helps strengthen relationship.

Three of my Favorite Books that share a different life perspective from my own.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it — from garden seeds to Scripture — is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

Credit – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7244.The_Poisonwood_Bible?ac=1&from_search=true

Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi

From the highly acclaimed, award-winning author of Floating in My Mother’s Palm comes a stunning novel about ordinary people living in extraordinary times.

Trudi Montag is a Zwerg—a dwarf—short, undesirable, different, the voice of anyone who has ever tried to fit in. Eventually she learns that being different is a secret that all humans share—from her mother who flees into madness, to her friend Georg whose parents pretend he’s a girl, to the Jews Trudy harbors in her cellar.

Ursula Hegi brings us a timeless and unforgettable story in Trudi and a small town, weaving together a profound tapestry of emotional power, humanity, and truth.

Credit – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77163.Stones_from_the_River?ac=1&from_search=true

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

An unforgettable journey into one man’s remarkable life, and an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others set in 1960s & 1970s Ethiopia and 1980s America.

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics—their passion for the same woman—that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him—nearly destroying him—Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.

Credit – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3591262-cutting-for-stone?ac=1&from_search=true

Enjoy!

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Stop Yelling at Me!

November 3, 2016 by @candesscampbell

Angering at someone is rarely effective. Whether you raise your voice, yell, call names or threaten; it’s really not helpful. What happens is people learn to avoid you or to get back at you by being passive aggressive.

Your feelings of anger are real, but anger is a secondary emotion. Anger covers up feelings of pain or fear. When you feel angry, before you start angering out at someone, ask yourself these questions. What am I afraid of? What hurts? Communicating with others directly about your fears and your pain can open the door for a better relationship.

When communicating, people often say, “I feel” when they really mean is “I think.” For instance, you may say “I felt attacked when you said such and such.” What you’re really saying is, “You attacked me.” Another way of saying that might be, “I felt scared,” “I felt paralyzed,” or “I felt hurt when you said such and such.”

[clickToTweet tweet=”Communicating directly about your fear and pain can create better relationships.” quote=”Communicating directly about your fear and pain can create better relationships.”]

It’s really difficult communicating with someone who is unwilling to explore the underlying issues in a relationship. If you find yourself wanting to keep busy and distract yourself rather than dealing with the issue or the relationship, the feelings you’re avoiding become buried. Feelings buried alive staying alive. What happens then is those feelings later surface around a similar issue, generally in an explosive reaction. That’s what it means to become triggered.

I was motivated to write this blog after reading a FaceBook post from a man who was angry and calling another person names because of their political view. That is a big issue here in the US right now. I was curious about this man, so I looked at his profile. He listed his profession as a sports coach to high school students. My immediate thought was do parents know that this person is acting as a coach and mentor to their children?

[clickToTweet tweet=”Be Kind – Be Kind – Be Kind!” quote=”“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.” ― Henry James”]

Feelings of anger are normal. If you are often reactive in an anger manner, it’s rare that you would be able to fix this on your own. Therapy can be really helpful and give you an opportunity to vent in a safe place and not at the person you’re angry with. You can learn some coping tools so you don’t damage your relationships. You may also even heal the underlying pain or make changes to clear the fear.

What is really important, especially now that bullying is so prevalent, is we teach our children how to communicate, not by what we say to them but by what they witness us saying and doing to others. Therapy is a luxury that you can’t afford not to give yourself if your anger tears at the fabric of your relationships.