What is Your Communication LifeStyle?

By Carolyn Finch

As I waited at the stop sign for the children to
get off the bus, I noticed a mother with a stroller and a sleeping baby waiting at the bus stop. I was only about 15 feet from the front of the bus and could see parents standing around. This mother was holding her smart phone with her head bent downward and at times would stop and then text  or enter a number and then the phone went back up to her ear. I never saw her check on the baby in the stroller nor did she look up. Soon a cute little light skinned boy with curly brown hair about 5 or 6 years old jumped off the bus and waved a paper with a painting at his mother. Mom paid no attention to the boy so he grabbed her leg and shouted "look mom look mom"
She looked down at him and shouted "I told you not to talk to me when I'm on the phone."

My heart sank and I wanted to cry as I'm sure that the little boy wanted to do. What an ideal time for communication. This amazing transition time when a child is enthusiastic about something he has created and at the same time happy to be getting home from school. Was this a dysfunctional communication moment?  It certainly appeared that way. Would this be the base to poor communication for the next few minutes, hours and maybe even days?

The  one major aspect of being a human being is that we are able to communicate orally. Have we forgotten to be thankful for this gift of true conversation? With the advent of smart phones we have a new addiction. Research shows that the average person with a smartphone texts an average of 100 time a day wow! This type of communication determines our lifestyle and our lifestyle determines our communication.

If we have an addiction of any kind such as shopping, drinking, drugs, sickness, foods whatever,
our typical conversation will include words, phrases and stories related to our addiction. Doesn't sound like a learning listener and quality conversation to me. Therefore my challenge to you as a Blog reader is to look at everyone you speak with, eye to eye and belly to belly. This way you will be listening to the other person and as a reward you will learn something from what they say. So add to your communication lifestyle the ability to listen with your eyes.

You can improve your communication by helping yourself become more enlightened after hearing me speak at your next conference. Call now for more information or for  a one on one Speech Coaching session.203 405 3972.

Carolyn Finch Body Language and Communication LifeStyle Expert TM
Professional Speaker who will put a SPARK in your next meeting!       carolyn@carolynfinch.com

Happy Valentine's Day

by Carolyn Finch

Life has its ups and downs and when we are down we are feeling sorry for ourselves. When we are up we want to share ourselves with others. Isn’t it interesting that the reading of a heart beat also goes up and down hmm-mm? Then comes a day in February that is called Valentine's Day. Did it start with the card companies? No it started in 260 AD. It happened during the rule of the Roman Empire, and the beginning of Christianity. Now picture the Romans in their Togas.and think what it might have been like at the pagan Lupercalia Fertility Festival.

To begin the festival according to the History Channel, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman Priests, would gather at a sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome were thought to have been cared for by the she-wolf or lupa. The priests would sacrifice a goat for fertility and a dog for purification. The men would then cut the goat hide into strips, dip then into the sacrificial blood and go into the streets gently slapping the women and the crop fields with the goat hides. Roman women were not fearful but welcomed  the touch of the hide because it was believed to make then more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day according to legend, women of the city would put their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would each pick a name and become paired for a year with their chosen woman. Sometimes these relationships would lead to marriage.

The celebration was tolerated by the early Christians but when there was more power the Christian church  named the Lupa celebration St. Valentine's Day to Christianize it more. By the Middle Ages Love found it's way into the yearly celebration of  St. Valentine's Day and the first written valentine greeting was in 1400. Who was St. Valentine? That is a lively discussion you may wish to have after you Google it. There was always much confusion and controversy about the day and the saint so in 1969 the Roman Catholic Church removed the Saint and the retailer took over. 

You may be a part of the 120  billion dollars spent on this holiday every year in the United States. This is spent on candy, flowers and gifts. (jewelry wins out.) So go ahead and share yourself with others through whatever means you wish. For me love hugs are the best. Think about what is the very best gift you can receive? It is another day of life. So breathe deeply, put your hand over your heart, feel it beat and think about the ups and and downs in your life and move on with gratitude. Now reach around your body with both arms and give yourself the biggest hug you have ever had, you deserve it!      Happy Valentine's Day.

      “She’ll hold them in the palm of her hand”

Let Carolyn hold your audience in the palm of her hand…“Carolyn was dynamic, exciting and very knowledgeable. She knows how to keep her audience involved,
I recommend her without any reservation”                  George Tomka,   Meeting of Lutheran Educators

  Carolyn Finch    Master Teacher - Coach - Speaker     
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             Communicate or Suffocate                                         
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Emotional Intelligence Part 5

Emotional Intelligence

Part 5

The key to making good decisions is being attuned to our feelings. The stronger the feelings the more attuned we need to be to make sure we aren’t blindly acting on something that we shouldn’t, especially when we are talking about the ever powerful emotion of anger.

Benjamin Franklin said a long time ago, “Anger is never without a reason, but seldom a good one.” Anger is the mood people are worst at controlling. Our self-righteous inner monologue fills our minds with convincing arguments for it. However, reframing the situation in a more positive light can help put anger to rest. When we feel anger coming on we should immediately go into distraction mode. Distract them, or, ourselves if angry, and reframe the angry situation to something better. Also, challenge those thoughts or feelings of anger.

Sadness is a mood that the majority of people put the most effort into shaking. Like anger, when we are feeling sad, we can challenge those feelings. However, do not ruminate in negative feelings. Just like anger, reframe sad thoughts to something more positive. This reframing is called, “Cognitive Reframing”. This cognitive reframing and writing down whatever negative or counterproductive thoughts one has in order to challenge them and then reframe them in a more positive light really helps one improve their emotional intelligence.

Did you know that emotional intelligence really helps in athletics? Athletes with high emotional intelligence have the special ability to motivate themselves to pursue relentless training routines without quitting due to boredom. It typically takes about 10,000 hours of practice to move near the top of one’s field on the national level, and 15,000 hours of practice to move near the top of one’s field on the international level. Very few people have the emotional intelligence to be able to stay motivated for that long, while facing and overcoming the setbacks that are bound to happen along the way.

Empathy is a powerful emotional intelligence. The failure to notice another’s feelings is a major deficit in emotional intelligence, and a tragic lapse in what it means to be human. Rapport, the root of caring, stems from emotional attunement, from the capacity for empathy. The roots of morality are to be found in empathy. Having empathy makes one more out-going, happier, and do better in school.

However, in order to be empathic it requires one to be calm enough, and receptive enough so that the subtle signals of feeling from another person can be received and mimicked by one’s own emotional brain. This is emotional intelligence.

Another key social competence is how well or how poorly people express their own feelings. This ability to express one’s own feeling have an immediate impact on the other people who are receiving them. This transaction could be good or bad depending how social and emotionally adept one is.

Those who are adept at social intelligence can connect with people quite smoothly, be astute in reading other’s reactions and feelings, lead and organize, and handle the disputes that are bound to flare up in any human activity. They are the natural leaders, the people who can express the unspoken collective sentiment and articulate it so as to guide a group toward its goals. They are the kind of people others like to be with because they are emotionally nourishing- they leave other people in a good mood and always see criticism as an opportunity to work with others rather than an adversarial situation. In addition, these star performers build relationship and networks long before they need them.

Dan Blanchard is an award-winning author, speaker, educator, a parent expert and certified life coach. Find out more about Dan at: www.GranddaddysSecrets.com

Emotional Intelligence Part 4

Emotional Intelligence

Part 4

High IQs don’t always predict how successful someone will become because many times it’s the ones that can control their irrational emotions and who have high EQs that become more successful. Hey, smart people do dumb things all the time. We all do dumb things because we are still operating through prehistoric emotional wiring and then trying to back up the crazy out of date moves we make with self-created faulty modern day logic.

So what exactly is emotional intelligence? Well, it’s probably more than I have room for in this article. But, let me take poke at it. Emotional intelligence is being able to motivate oneself to persist in the face of frustration, to control impulse, and delay gratification, to regulated moods, and keep distress from swamping our ability to think rationally, and empathize with others and to never lose hope, even when the odds are against us.

Wouldn’t you agree that this list above is very important to us humans? Well, sadly, today, schools and our modern neocortex thinking culture is fixated on mostly academic abilities while pretty much ignoring emotional intelligence. I wonder if the modern day school shootings are a symptom of our society not paying enough attention to emotional intelligence in order to just etch out a few more points on some standardized test.

Hey, no one is saying that emotional intelligence is an end all. We all know that we need the complete package to be successful and well-adjusted in life where we don’t do dumb violent things anymore. After all, emotional aptitude is really just a meta-ability, although a very important meta-ability, which helps determine how well we can use whatever other skills we have, including raw intellect.

Emotional intelligence plays a big enough role that Howard Gardner has said that it is not uncommon for people with 160 IQs to work for people who have 100 IQs if the 100s have a good intra and inter-personal intelligence. Come on… We all know really smart people who are working for someone else, instead of themselves.

So, in short, being super smart with a super high IQ is not an end all in itself either. Hey, if we focus only on the intellect then we will miss out on what it means to be human, and never get to experience the higher values of the human heart of faith, hope, devotion, and love. Through focusing only on intellect we’ll never solve the real human problems of this world that really matter. This sounds kind of sad, doesn’t it?

One way that emotional intelligence helps us, if we let it, is through that gut-feeling. These somatic-markers, or gut-feelings can steer us away from trouble or unveil opportunities for us without us even knowing how or why. This is the way we are emotionally wired. If we are smart enough we can use it to our benefit. We used to either jump at food, or jump out of the way of some other animal trying to eat us. We didn’t have time to think about it. We just instinctually acted. Today those same pre-historic instincts are still there telling us to quickly move to avoid trouble or move to gain something good. Our thinking brain, hasn’t had a chance yet to fully formulate what this gut feeling is telling us. And by the time it does formulate a rational decision, it may be too late.

Dan Blanchard is an award-winning author, speaker, educator, a parent expert and certified life coach. Find out more about Dan at: www.GranddaddysSecrets.com

Is Organizing a Waste of Time?

“BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!” It’s 5:00AM on a Tuesday morning. You roll over, foggy eyed and hit the snooze button. 18 minutes later your body finally negotiates with your mind and you crawl out of bed. You disconnect your smartphone from the charger and begin looking at emails and social media, when you glace at the time…6:00AM! You race to the shower, get yourself groomed, and skip breakfast, seeing you need to be on the road by 7:00AM. You glace at the kitchen clock on the way out the door. 6:55AM. Maybe you’ll have time to hit the drive-thru for a quick bite on the way to work?

Your car is in the driveway yet again. Why? It’s too big to fit into the two-car garage. How can a vehicle be too big for a two-car garage? Well, it’s not really the fault of the vehicle. It’s the endless piles of “stuff” in the garage, which has rendered this car to the outdoor elements. And last nights elements came in the form of snow, eight inches of snow. Now you need a shovel, but….it’s in the garage.

You open the side garage door under the covered porch to retrieve the shovel. As you open the door, you need to push with some force to fit your body through the entrance. Stuff is in the way. As you look around the garage, all you see is stuff, stuff and more stuff. No shovel. You remember using the shovel last year and tossing it back in the garage. So, it must be under this jungle of junk, but where? Your hands are numb from the cold, as you pull out your phone, to check the time…7:25AM. You loose your grip, and your phone crashes on a metal object, which looks to be a tire iron. The screen is cracked, but it’s still working. Phew. This isn’t the first time you’ve cracked a screen on your phone.

You should have been on the road at 7AM, but that’s not going to happen this morning. Your stress level is boiling over now. Frantically, you start sifting through the piles of stuff; worn out boxes of old sporting equipment, ripped bags of clothes that no longer fit, broken toys with missing parts, and various tool equipment in disrepair. Panic has set in. As your eye scans the piles of contents in the garage, you notice what looks like part of a red handle. THE SHOVEL!! You start climbing over the stuff until you finally reach your goal. As you reach your arm out to grab the shovel, you hear a awful sound….”SNAP!"

Sound familiar? It’s time to make room for clarity. Start by decluttering your garage. Doing so, will save you time in the long run, so you can find the things you’re looking for quickly and easily.

As a Professional Organizer, Speaker, Author, TV Personality, and Podcast Producer & Host, Rick Woods helps residents and businesses make room for clarity, by getting rid of the clutter that gets in their way.


Rick’s book “Make Room for Clarity” is a step by step guide to getting rid of the clutter that gets in your way. Available on Amazon.

Inquire about Rick's professional organizing business, "The Functional Organizer, LLC.", which focuses on decluttering, organizing, paper filing and time management by visiting www.TheFunctionalOrganizer.com