Hi, this is Beth from Sonic Connections.

With this brief exercise, we're going to start exploring communication, which is honestly one of the hardest parts of group dynamics, of working in a team, of just being a human.

And so to start focusing on the music, the music is going to assist us in visualizing and picturing things.

So just listen for a moment and see what comes up.

Once you're settled, I invite you to picture somebody who understands you.

Maybe it's a friend, a family member, maybe it's someone that you don't even know.

Could be an artist or musician or an author, just someone who you feel gets you.

Maybe someone who's shared something that made you go, yeah, that's how I feel, I get it.

What is it specifically about their communication that makes you feel so seen?

Are they patient?

Are they humorous?

Are they direct and clear and maybe even brutal with their honesty?

What do you appreciate about the communication style of this person the most?

You can think about nonverbal elements too, body language or facial expressions.

You're welcome to jot down whatever comes up for you or just hold it in your mind's eye.

Now let's shift to thinking about how communication has been going at work or with the group of people that you need to communicate with.

What feelings arise when you let yourself picture how you've been communicated to and how you are communicating?

Maybe there's frustration, maybe there's apathy, maybe you feel checked out, maybe you do feel seen and heard, but just really visualize how has communication honestly been going for you and how do you feel about it?

While communication is tricky, obviously we know this because so much of communication is what we're perceiving.

It's our interpretation of the energy or the mood or the tone or the nonverbals.

Sometimes we feel disrespected because of a tone of voice.

We can interpret communication as feeling dismissed or rushed.

Sometimes there's an annoyance when folks are taking too long to communicate or not being clear and you perceive that as incompetence.

Now we can't control how other people communicate with us, but we can identify the feelings that we are bringing into that interaction.

We can address them and then we can start to come to more of an understanding by owning the pieces that we are bringing into it.

So I invite you to ask yourself, what is the story that I'm telling myself about what is being communicated to me or not being communicated to me?

Do I feel like my ideas are not being valued?

Am I telling myself that other folks are too silly or not serious enough and we're not getting anything done?

What is the story?

Take a moment to write that story down in just one or two sentences.

The story that I'm telling myself about how I'm being communicated to is.

Now let's think about ourselves.

How do I communicate when I'm feeling frustrated or when I'm feeling like there's a disconnect?

Do I tend to shut down or get snippy or get passive aggressive?

Do I use humor to deflect?

What are the patterns that I recognize in myself?

And can I name those without judgment knowing that we all have patterns?

And what is one thing that I can shift or change about how I communicate in order to strive for better connection?

Just like we can shift our focus to different instruments, we can shift our attention from the stories we're telling ourselves to our actual behavior when we're in a conversation.

I'm going to leave you with a quote by psychologist William James who wrote, quote, my experience is what I agree to attend to.

Each of us literally chooses by his way of attending to things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit, end quote.

To me, this means if we believe the stories that we tell ourselves, they often become the reality.

And so identify what those stories are.

Identify our communication patterns in response to those stories and see if we can start to talk about them with the people that we communicate with regularly.

Can we share what we need in communication to feel heard?

You can use this to spark conversation with your team or just as an entry point for your own personal reflection.

Thanks for joining this practice.