If you would like a little more magic in your life, raising your affinity for the other person is a super effective and rapid way to create it.

It’s not something that needs to happen only once in a while. You can do it in every conversation you have. Even in horrible, terrible, hammered situations with “difficult” people. Especially in those.

Amy came to Causative Communication thinking she had to learn to “be more forceful”, but that made her feel defeated because it was so far from who she really is, and it wasn’t who she wanted to be.  It meant sacrificing too important a part of herself.

I loved her immediately.

The problem wasn’t that Amy was soft-spoken. The problem was that she had absolutely no intention when she communicated.

Everyone also tells me, “I know that listening and acknowledging are ‘the right thing to do’” and they wish they could do it because, “A good person does it.”

But, there seems to be a big split between “The right thing to do” and GETTING THINGS DONE!

Of course, people want to do the right thing and be a good person, and the people I teach really are good people already. But more than anything, they need to GET THINGS DONE!

There’s a love that happens at work that’s not a romantic love. It comes from sharing and working together to achieve a deeply-felt, and deeply personal, purpose. It comes from pure appreciation. It comes from real admiration. It comes from the joy of creating something incredible with someone or someones. Perhaps you are thinking of someone in your life that you feel this for as you read this.  Then you know - it’s powerful and deep.

Large corporations give us an extremely limited vocabulary for expressing this deep love. And great restrictions on how we communicate it.

“The thing about working in a really large corporation is I’m not very powerful.”

Carla didn’t realize that what she was telling me wasn’t a fact.  It was a decision. 

Many people don’t get this.  They confuse their decisions with “the facts of life”.  These only become facts after the decisions that create them.  Different decisions create different facts.

Here’s how it played out for Carla and how she did the impossible.