Elevate Your Self-Awareness: Effective Communication Techniques for Personal Growth
Do You Ever Wish You Could Get Out Of Your Own Way?
Learning how to communicate effectively with yourself is a great way of removing your road blocks; this is something I learnt how to do more easily on my NLP Coaching course.
Becoming an NLP Practitioner
Last weekend I qualified as an NLP Practitioner. I find the term NLP (Neural Linguistics Programme) is more easily described as a way of changing someone’s thoughts and behaviours in order to achieve specific goals. You will probably have come across some of the techniques or principles without even realising it, I know I have.
It was a really fun course where a lot of growth took place for myself and my peers. I started this course because I wanted to not only learn the skills to be able to help others better, but I wanted to grow too. I wanted to raise my self awareness and be able to communicate better. What I didn’t expect was I’d learn how to effectively communicate with myself.
I also learned that tools I’ve used in my professional life can be adapted to help with personal growth. I particularly like this tool which is known as The Disney Process or The Disney Method. This process enables you to view the problem from three different perspectives, the Dreamer, Realist and Critic.
Creativity In The Workplace
When I was Innovation Manager I facilitated creativity workshops that were designed to help us develop new fundraising products. This process involved generating as many ideas as possible, (dreamer), narrowing down the ideas to what was practical (realist), working out what potential pitfalls existed (critic).
Uncovering Your Dreams and What’s Stopping You Achieving Them
From a personal perspective, this process can be used to uncover what your dreams are. Dreams that will make you feel more fulfilled. It can also help you understand what is preventing you from achieving your dreams.
Communicating With The Different Parts Of You
Have you ever felt conflicted about something because despite how much one part of you wants something, there is another part of you that wants to sabotage you?
For example, you desperately want a certain job, yet you always encounter a stumbling block, maybe this block appears before you’ve even start searching?
“you can’t do that”
“you don’t know anything about that”
“you’re not good enough to do that”
These are just some responses you might hear.
Do you find that voice really irritating and unhelpful? I know I sure do. I regularly have conversations with myself about whether or not I should do something and after some considerable time, I’ll make a decision. This could take anywhere from between a few hours to a few years… yes! a few years!! Have you read Feel Stuck of Trapped in the Life You Live?
Somatic Experiencing
One aspect I enjoyed most about this course was we used physical movement and somatic experiencing to enhance the overall experience and as someone who is quite kinaesthetic, this was enlightening. Remember the little voice telling you to give it up because you aren’t good enough?
How do you normally respond to it? Try and ignore it and do nothing? Shut it down and just do it? Or do you communicate/negotiate with it?
I don’t think I have ever really effectively communicated with it, not in the way we did on this course.
Talking to myself
I’ve never thought about separating out my parts (the different voices), so like in my creativity workshop, we separated out the realist, the critic and the dreamer. Each part had a position labelled on the floor.
The role of the critic in this process is to help you achieve your dream, not hinder you, so we found it helpful to create a negative critic, which could potentially be the block to all activity and for me, had the loudest and most prominent voice.
Surprising Benefits of Communicating with Yourself
This is where it gets special. My negative critic is quick, sometimes so quick my dreamer doesn’t get a look in. My realist is strong, practical and confident, however my negative critic is always lurking in the background ready to sabotage at any opportune moment.
So why is this - why would I want to sabotage myself?
This is when I got my parts to start communicating with each other. It became so much more tangible because I would stand on each position depending on who was speaking; it was an extremely bizarre experience and definitely best facilitated with a coach.
The critic (negative and positive) ultimately plays a role of protection, but how do we tell our negative critic that this is a safe environment?
During my session with ‘my coach’, my realist and negative critic engaged in a conversation about why I shouldn’t be doing the thing I need to do to achieve my dream. My realist questioned why. This is where it gets a bit deep and memories either come back to you or they don’t. Either way, you get a sense of why your negative critic feels this way; it’s likely there will be a past event that you reacted negatively to and now you are being protected from the same occurrence.
This process enables you to really get to know yourself and what each part of you wants and why.
Self awareness is raised and this is the key to personal growth. Once you become aware, you can start to change things.
Are You Ready For Personal Growth?
Do you know what you want from your life? What you want to do? Do you know how you want to live?
If you aren’t able to provide clear answers, download your Reflect and Reset Guide now to become super clear. This simple 3 step guide is designed to help you gain instant clarity. I love it and use it regularly to check I’m on track.
Personal growth requires you to be vulnerable and to look deep inside yourself and face it head on, sometimes it can be uncomfortable, but discomfort is where the growth occurs. Personally, I say bring on the discomfort because once it’s over, I am able to move on more efficiently and effectively.
As a coach, my role is to help you move forward. I can help you get clear on what you want and give you the strategies to move you forward with confidence. Is this something you are interested in?
My name is Sabrina Qua and I am on a mission to empower women to live more fulfilling and balanced lives by helping them reconnect with their identity, their dreams and break free from their limitations.
If you feel overwhelmed and anxious because your current life no longer brings you joy but you don’t know what you want, or you don’t know how to get what you want, the good news is you can change this and move forward.
By exploring who you are and what’s important to you, you will become clear on the direction you need to take. Clarity and vision is the most effective way to creating a life which you find fulfilling and exciting.
Personal growth requires work, but it can also be so much fun, so I ask you to keep an open mind, be curious and get ready to live your best life.