Jeremy looked at me and I was completely caught off guard. Not in a romantic way, but in an, “Oh my God, you’ve touched my soul!” way. It was the pure way he tuned into me. It felt like the deepest part of ourselves had touched and connected. We were completely open to each other. It happened a lot over the next three days.
It wasn’t always that way. I had met with Jeremy, a successful corporate executive, numerous times before. I liked him, and I liked working with him. But I would’ve described our conversations as “normal”. Not extraordinary or unusual, definitely not spectacular. Ordinary - we got things done. I was happy with it because I wanted to get things done.
However good he was at many things, Jeremy was too much in his head to fully perceive the people in the room around him, always thinking ahead, moving on.
Now, he was in the in-person Causative Communication course, and during the first lecture on “Being There”, Jeremy suddenly gave a start and exclaimed, “Oh wow! I just realized I’m never there in meetings!” It startled him.
I knew what Jeremy was now reaching for. Something he didn’t know was there before, but now that he did, it was going to be his.
Causative Communication starts with a state of being. And the most important thing you can learn is how to actually be there. After my lecture, they all did a challenging training exercise to learn how to do it.
It sets the stage for being able to control and focus your attention, so that in the next exercise, which is called “Confronting”, you learn to focus your attention on the person in front of you. We use the original definition of the word “confront” which means simply “to face”.
This is a silent drill that takes practice. You learn how to be there comfortably, have genuine affinity and simply perceive another person.
Not just dimly perceive the person in front of you, which is what passes for ordinary normal life. But to use all your senses and fully tune in to the person in front of you. You start to experience something nameless and extraordinary.
Get the idea of having a person in front of you. Get the idea you’ve stopped thinking about anything, you’re just being there comfortably looking at them, fully tuning in to this one person in front of you. It’s a rich experience.
You have to master this ability before you speak, before you listen. In the in-person Causative Communication program, it takes half a day. It’s not something we skate over lightly.
The power and the impact of this ability cannot be overstated. What happens when someone with this ability turns their eyes to you is pure magic.
And it becomes the foundation for every time you speak, every time you listen. It takes speaking and listening to a level high above and beyond the grasp of the ordinary.
Jeremy’s ability to persuade dramatically improved. In his “Before” and “After” video you see this so clearly. In his “Before” video, Jeremy’s going around in fruitless circles with the person who’s being stubborn. In his “After” video, you see Jeremy achieve his objective in two minutes flat and with tremendous ease, the other person smiling the moment Jeremy looks at him, nodding the moment Jeremy starts to speak.
I never taught Jeremy how to persuade. Trying to persuade does not achieve this magic. On the contrary, you often go around in circles and without ever wanting to, you leave the other person cold.
There’s a nameless something that happens when Jeremy talks to you now that creates a level of mutual dignity, respect and affinity. It takes it out of the realm of ordinary human or executive communication to a level that can only be described as magic. Which is why so many of our students, who never use that word in relation to anything about their corporate jobs, use it often during and after our classes. They bring magic to their conversations.
What creates this level of communication is not known by most people. But I’m lucky, I get to experience it every day, with new batches of students every week. From “early in career” to the most senior executives. There’s no level this magic doesn’t touch, and there’s no required status to learn it.
You are capable of doing this. . You can start applying what you’ve read here to every conversation you have today. You can start to make the people around you feel the way Jeremy makes others feel now. See what happens. What a day you will have!
Be the cause!
Ingrid