Mindful communication

Apart from humans, bottlenose dolphins have the most sophisticated communication, using a combination of vocal sounds like whistles and clicks, and body language. They vocalize emotions, use whistles as individual names, and communicate about their environment. Dolphins also interact across species and can mimic the sounds of humans and other animals.

The ability to communicate was a defining development of human evolution, leading to the growth of our larger brains to support conversation and thinking using language. Humans are social animals, so the quality of communication at work and in our personal lives is fundamental to our well-being and that of those around us.

Unfortunately, we are not born with a life manual on how to communicate well. Apart from learning a language, we are not explicitly taught how to communicate effectively as we grow up. Similar to becoming a parent, communication is one of those many things that we end up learning by doing, sometimes making mistakes, and then adapting. Consider for a moment, just how much time in a typical day we’re either receiving or sending information. We’re not only in conversation with other people; we also watch TV, listen to the radio, read, and respond to social media and emails – so typically we communicate for many hours a day.
Good communication involves attention and awareness. Without awareness of ourselves and others, it is no wonder the world sometimes appears full of different interpretations and conflicts. Although it can be relatively easy to walk, eat, or wash up mindfully, given how important communication is, it is ironic how difficult it is to remain mindful when we are engaged in conversation with another human being.

So why is this?

One reason is that we can become self-conscious. In other words, our attention and awareness turn inwards as we identify with limiting thoughts and feelings about ourselves, or with the negative judgements that we assume other people are making about us. Being self-conscious is something everyone experiences when we’re out of our comfort zone and is quite natural. For instance, we’re more likely to be self-conscious in situations like a job interview or speaking to a large audience. Self-awareness works at another level, with more space and freedom of movement. So if we experience negative thoughts or feelings, we notice and acknowledge them as they arise, without automatically identifying with them.

Another reason is that when we are awake our powerful minds are always online; like a proactive super-computer serving interpretations, associations, learning, spotting patterns, and prompting our own conversational response. It is interesting that the average person listens at a rate between 400-600 words per minute and speaks at 125 words per minute, which leaves loads of time for the mind to wander.

Mindful communication means:

Remaining in the present moment
Aware of thoughts arising without letting our attention be diverted away from the act of communicating
Aware of feelings as they arise without letting them de-stabilize who we are in the moment
Aware of and grounded in our body – without becoming self-conscious
Truly connecting with the other person and giving them our full attention

When another person is speaking:

Actively listening to the sound of their voice
Connecting with them as a whole person with a complex inner life just like your own
Letting go of any judgemental thoughts that may arise
Bringing patience, openness, curiosity, and kindness

When you are speaking:

Speaking from the “best of yourself” – from a stable, open and aware position
Being kind and authentic
Making a conscious effort to bring out the best in someone else – being generous with genuine gratitude and appreciation

We can continually improve the quality of our communication throughout our lives. Mindful awareness of how we communicate helps us to learn faster. It also gives us the wisdom, space, and freedom to be much more skilful in how we communicate.

Compassion at work

The pandemic has brought many changes in how people work. Some lost their livelihoods and others, depending on what they do, now work in a hybrid way, with time split between working from home and in the office. As well as these changes, there has also been a greater focus on health and wellbeing across organisations.

The first organisations were teams of hunter-gatherers, who lived and worked together in small nomadic groups. People played distinct roles and brought together diverse knowledge and experience, so the whole was greater than the sum of the parts, which is one of the fundamental reasons why we have organisations. There are still hunter-gatherer tribes, like the Yanomami in Brazil and Bushmen in Botswana working the same way today. We were hunter-gatherers for around 90% of our history, living in extended social groups of up to 150 trusted or well-known people. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar showed that humans can comfortably support up to 150 relationships. If the number increases beyond 150, we lose the capacity to really know and trust people well enough. This research also supports good practice for organisational design. For instance, the Gore-Tex waterproof clothing company found that they were less productive when more than 150 people worked together at the same location. Like a “golden ratio” for how people work well together, Gore-Tex uses the principle to make sure that “everyone knows everyone”, improving social cohesion and making the company more effective. This helps to explain why some large organisations in the past, who were ignorant of this principle, tended to use a command-and-control style of management, which assumes that people cannot be trusted, so need to be coerced by authority to carry out a task. Some leaders like Henry Ford saw people as little more than machines, and said, “Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?”

From a human perspective, this management mindset tends to be simplistic, limited, cold and hard. It avoids the warm, soft, and rich complexity of what it means to be human. There’s no space, openness, understanding, or compassion for what people think and feel. While this may have worked for early car production, it’s out of place in the globalised, digital workplace of today, where autonomy, emotional literacy, and the ability to work effectively with others are vitally important. Apart from a few innovative new organisations, most are still slowly evolving to adapt to the new realities and so have a mix of different management styles. In the best case, the old-school mindset shows poor emotional literacy and communication skills and in the worst case turns a blind eye to bullying and inequality. So, it’s no surprise that research shows a greater rate of sickness absence against these outdated leadership styles.

Compassion is the ability to feel for what someone’s experiencing by bringing kindness and understanding. Empathy is about feeling with, which means taking on the feelings of others. So, for instance, if someone is anxious, with empathy you are also feeling the anxiety, which may not be the best way to help them.

So how can organisations change to become more open, compassionate, and understanding with their employees as well as customers? One way is to promote compassion within leadership behaviours and organisational culture. There is good evidence that compassionate leadership leads to improved employee wellbeing, satisfaction, and commitment. Another is to use the practice of mindful compassion to improve emotional literacy and relationships at work.

Promoting and practising mindful compassion at work makes a difference as it:

Includes the broader dimensions of human experience, the mind, emotions, body, senses, and relationships
Helps people become more aware of, and understand their own emotions, as well as how other people feel
Helps people understand the important role that emotion plays in our lives; driving us to act, alerting us to something that needs attention, and showing others how we feel
Allows us to see things from another person’s perspective, walking in their shoes
Makes us more open, patient, generous and understanding; giving people the time and space to be heard

Now that actual robots are building cars, people no longer need to be treated like machines. We need to learn the lessons from how we evolved and maybe work in smaller groups with shared trust and understanding. And on a personal level, relating with other people with connection, openness, and kindness; acknowledging that everyone experiences difficulties and negative emotions and has a rich and complex inner life just like your own.

Suggested weekly practices

Be aware of any stress of difficulties that colleagues may be going through at work and in their home lives and bring openness, kindness, and compassion.
If there is someone you are having trouble with, work towards building a more compassionate, relationship with them by walking in their shoes and seeing them as a complete person just like yourself.
Reflect on how many people you know and have built trust within your social network at work. Is this close to Robin Dunbar’s number of 150 people?

Guidance

Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then play the second practice to explore and experience kindness and compassion to others, even strangers and people you do not particularly like.

We do it to ourselves

The email about the impending organisational changes arrived in Henry’s inbox. His body tense, his chest heavy, and breath shallow, he opened the email, and his mind went into overdrive: “If I lose my job, it’ll cause conflict with my wife; we’ll get divorced, sell the house; I’ll be unemployable and eventually chucked out of my sad little bedsit and onto the street…” And this is even before Henry reads what the email has to say.

The 1995 Radiohead song called, “Just” has an amusing yet troubling video. The song includes the chorus: “You do it to yourself, you do, and that’s what really hurts; is that you do it to yourself; just you and no one else; you do it to yourself”.

We rarely experience reality directly. Instead, we construct our own as we perceive whatever comes through our senses through filters, biases, and interpretations, using our thoughts, beliefs, moods, emotions, and habitual behaviour. As individuals, these ideas, beliefs, and behaviours are powerfully reinforced through social agreement within our social groups, wider society, institutions, and the media.

We can easily get tangled up in a semi-conscious mind-state of intermingled thoughts, emotions, and reactiveness that takes us on a downward spiral. Negative self-talk and mental chatter amplify frustration, anxiety, and low mood, which then reduce our self-worth and limit our cognitive capacity. It’s not as if some external agent has done this to us; we do it to ourselves.

As a whole human being our mind, emotions, body and senses are all interconnected and influence and feed each other. We tend to see these aspects as separate, which helps us make sense of what’s going on, but in reality, they’re all a connected part of the whole. A useful way of looking at how these areas are interconnected is to imagine a five-pointed star, with senses, mind, emotion, body, and response on the points and experience as a circle in the centre:

Senses are the main input to our experience from the outside world, from sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell as well as the sense of where our body is. Coming to our senses also connects us to the present moment.

Mind refers to the thoughts, beliefs, ideas, judgements, comparisons, anticipations, etc. about our situation and environment, which shape our reality.

Emotions alert us that something we’ve perceived through our senses or thoughts needs attention and prepare our body for action. Emotions also play a communication role in social interactions and drive thoughts.

Body is the biological organism that supports our life and experience, which provides physical sensations and feelings, and connects us to the present.

Response refers to how we respond, which can be a skilful choice of the most appropriate and relevant response, or by reacting automatically without any freedom.

Experience is whatever we’re experiencing in the present moment. At its most complete, this can include all thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and everything that we can experience through our senses. At its most limited this could be that we’re lost and limited in automatic thoughts, where we almost forget that we have a body and senses at all.

Imagine that Henry was working with his experience mindfully. When he saw the email, he would have noticed anxiety arise, as well as worrying thoughts. He acknowledges and is self-compassionate about the anxiety as well as the worrying thoughts, responding by saying to himself, “Wow, I hadn’t realised how vulnerable I feel about this organisational change. That chain of thoughts was a bit ridiculous. I’ll take a few intentional and aware breaths and open the email to read through what it says properly.”

Although life can sometimes be difficult, we often add to the challenge by tripping ourselves up in several ways, as if we were our own worst enemy. When we lose connection with the full richness and vitality of what it means to be human, we limit and diminish ourselves. We can reverse these powerful mechanisms and start untangling the knot of what we have done to ourselves, by building awareness of all of these areas of mind, emotion, body, and senses, together with a kinder and more compassionate relationship with ourselves.

Suggested weekly practice

Investigate how you construct your perception of reality – through moods, emotions, thoughts, and beliefs.
Watch your thoughts to see if they are open, fresh, and relevant, or really playing out old habit patterns that no longer serve you or others.
Remember to connect into wholeness, by bringing all modes of mind, emotions, body, and senses into awareness and how you respond to your experience.

Guidance
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified, and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then play the second practice to explore the different dimensions of our experience, from the mind, emotions, body, and senses, and how we respond and connect with a kinder and more compassionate relationship with ourselves.

Feeling tone

Leo Tolstoy said, “All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow”. Light and shade are both wonderful properties of reality. We all experience the light and shade of life, the highs, and lows, like a musical melody, or the changing colours of the seasons. Sometimes we experience pleasure, elation, and happiness when everything goes our way, and at other times life pushes back against our hopes and expectations, leading to sadness, and frustration.

Most children in western culture are told fairy tales that introduce light and shade. Sometimes problems need to be solved. There are pleasant and unpleasant people and situations, so we need to build resilience.

Deep within our body and brain, we bias our experience of sensations, situations, and people into pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral feeling tones. Moving your hand towards a fire on a cold day is a pleasant feeling tone and moving it too close becomes unpleasant. Feeling tone arises before we experience emotions and thoughts and goes all the way back to early evolution. Even single-celled organisms will move towards pleasant things like food and away from unpleasant things like heat. So, it is no surprise that we tend to be drawn toward pleasant experiences and push away unpleasant ones.

We experience changes in feeling tone every day. We can be in a relatively happy neutral mood, then something small happens. This could be something like a minor disappointment; finding that we’ve run out of coffee, or dismay that our bank balance is lower than expected, for instance. Whatever the small event is, there’s a subtle change in feeling tone that we often fail to notice. Going unnoticed, the unpleasant feeling tone can then influence emotions and thoughts and colour our mood during the day.

Three things that make feeling tone powerful are that it:

Arises at a low level, on the first contact with an object or event, before being perceived and interpreted by the mind.
Generally, operates below conscious awareness, so needs skilful awareness to notice.
Contributes to our mood, and sense of self and identity. There is always some form of feeling tone in the background of our experience.

As well as feeling tone arising in the present moment, we can also experience feeling tone from our past. For instance, a child has an unpleasant experience eating a tomato, with an associated feeling tone. As the child develops into adulthood, even the thought of a tomato brings an unpleasant feeling tone back to the body, stimulating thoughts like, “I’m not someone who likes tomatoes”. Although this example is relatively trivial, it does make the point that we’re always more than our thoughts, feelings, and sensations. When we make the interactions between them part of our identity, they can define who we are.

Of course, enjoying a pleasant feeling is an important part of life’s experience. The downside are that a pleasant feeling tone can sometimes be about craving for something, like an addiction to tobacco, impulse buying, or about wanting to hold onto a pleasant experience.

We interpret the world from two directions: top-down and bottom-up, each with its own form of intelligence. We interpret top-down through conscious thinking, based on knowledge and experience. We also make sense of the world from the bottom up through feeling tone and then emotions, which are less accessible to conscious awareness.

To work more skilfully with feeling tone means building awareness of this useful resource. After all, feelings are a form of feedback that tells us that something needs attention. For example, we may be at the cashpoint and notice a change in feeling tone. Noticing and identifying the change in feeling tone we could have the thought “There’s a change in feeling tone” while acknowledging the trigger with openness and kindness, “That’s to do with my old anxiety pattern with personal finance that no longer serves me”. Then by exploring where the feeling tone resonates in the body and releasing any physical contraction and tightness, we break the negative spiral of emotions, thoughts, and moods.

Noticing and working skilfully with feeling tone is not easy but becoming more aware of and acknowledging what a powerful seed this is to subsequent emotions and mind-states makes a real difference to our sense of ease, happiness, and wellbeing.

Suggested weekly practice

Check-in with yourself during the week to see what feeling tone is around.
When you encounter situations that you know are unpleasant, like getting on a crowded train, sense and acknowledge the feeling tone and work with it as outlined above and see what difference this makes
Explore what feeling tone you may still be holding from your past that has led to your likes and dislikes.

Guidance
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps
Then play the second audio to explore your feeling tone

Freedom

During the 19th Century, African American slaves who escaped to find freedom from the southern United States were supported by a secret network of routes, safe houses, and brave individuals. This was called The Underground Railroad, which is also the title of a book and film, which does not hold back on the brutal and inhuman cruelty of the plantation owners.

Freedom can be defined as the absence of compulsion, coercion, or constraint in our choice or action. In the Western world, we are fortunate to live in relative freedom, which is all too easy to take for granted. Freedom is relative and personal, and, as Nelson Mandela pointed out, also includes the freedom of others. We have relative economic freedom but still have to work to pay the bills. We have political freedom, but we may find that our votes do not always count. We have freedom of expression but find that it’s not always wise to speak out against the status quo. We have freedom of movement but may need to get a visa to visit certain countries. We have psychological freedom but sometimes experience limiting thoughts and unpleasant feelings. Of all of these freedoms, it is the ones that are closest to us, the thoughts, emotions, body, and senses that determine our relationship with the world and other people, which are the most relevant for mindfulness practice.

Thoughts
There are various estimates on how many thoughts we have in a typical day, from 25,000 to 70,000. Even if the former is true, that means our brain is like a busy city transport hub with thousands of passengers coming and going. No wonder we sometimes feel agitated and full of noise and stress.

Knowing that we are not our thoughts, mental freedom is about noticing:
Where our attention is at any moment
The difference between intentional and unintentional thinking
Whether thoughts serve us and other people, or not
Whether thoughts are useful, expanding, and nurturing. or not useful, limiting and depleting
When we become attached and bound to thoughts

Emotions
We may not experience as many emotions and feelings as thoughts during a day, but they can easily have a powerful impact, especially when they remain unacknowledged. Like the weather, we are always in some kind of mood, so noticing if our mood is bright and sunny, or overcast with occasional downpours, is a good start. Emotions come and go over the day. From experience, we know that positive emotions are non-stick like Teflon and negative emotions are like Velcro and hang around for much longer than needed.

Knowing that we are not our emotions, emotional freedom means:
Being more aware of the mood we are in
Acknowledging feelings and emotions as they arise, if possible
Allowing feelings to be just as they are
Creating the conditions for emotional stability
Being kind and compassionate with ourselves and others

There are many ways that we can experience freedom through practising mindfulness: letting go of past habit patterns that no longer serve us, releasing held tightness and tension in the body, and knowing that we are always more than our thoughts and emotions. And by becoming more awake and aware of what it is to be human, we may even discover greater freedom in other areas of our lives.

Suggested weekly practice

Take the time to discover areas of your life where you could find greater freedom
Notice thoughts that cultivate freedom and those that are limiting
As a human you have the most potential of any creature in the known universe, so explore and appreciate the freedom that you already have

Guidance

Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then close your eyes while this meditation plays that explores freedom in our mind and emotions.