The invisible blocker to getting your ideas across
Getting ideas across to an audience coherently is a crucial part of communication skills. Whether in business or other walks of life. But when communication becomes difficult or ineffective, the first inclination might be to turn to a book or video to try and find a quick solution to the problem.
Whilst a quick tip might help you a bit the next time you have something important to communicate, it rarely provides a long term solution to the core underlying problem – why am I struggling to say what I want to say?
Musical motor skills
In the musical world, playing an instrument at the highest level requires carefully developed fine motor skills. These facilitate the subtlety required to bring different layers of light and shade to any great performance.
To achieve and sustain these skills throughout any music career, an understanding of how excess muscular tension can affect the ability of each hand to hold an instrument freely and in turn allow each part of each finger to work independently is critical to avoiding developing muscular injuries that can sadly prematurely end a blossoming performing career.
The parallels to communication in the business world and other non-musical environments
You might say, so what – what has how you hold and play a musical instrument got to do with why I’m struggling to get my ideas across?
Well, as with communicating with others through music, ultimately for other forms of communication, whether that’s speaking, typing an e-mail or writing a letter, they all involve the use of different muscles in the body. Be they throat muscles, or the muscles you use to sit on a chair to type an email at a computer. But if the muscles aren’t working effectively and hold unnecessary tension, that can start to make communicating tiring and/or painful. And if the body becomes tired and uncomfortable, then the mind can unfortunately, follow suit – which in turn can make coherent, fluid and effective communication very difficult.
Unfortunately, the result of excess and unhelpful muscular tensions are often only highlighted when things start to become a real struggle; for example, when we are struggling to put thoughts into words, or words into speech – when it feels like the body is resisting and stopping our ability to communicate anything.
The pick up a pencil test
In the musical world, the inability to play an instrument freely and therefore, communicate with any flexibility or expressivity becomes acutely highlighted when the fine motor skills begin to run into problems. The lip muscles may continuously collapse when trying to play a note on the trumpet, or it might become far too painful to hold down or move a finger on the fingerboard of a violin. Such problems can often require much unwinding to get to the root cause of the problem and once that is overcome, it may take months or even years to re-build the fine motor skills.
In the 21st century, people rely so much on phones and computers that the use of fine motor skills in every day use, such as putting pen to paper, is becoming something of a lost art. Computers even produce our signatures these days. But if you pick up a pencil between just two fingers and try and move it very slowly for a little while, you may start to gain a perspective of whether your fine motor skills are in good shape because you might start to feel other tension in your body, be that in the wrist, the neck, the shoulders, the pelvis, the throat, or elsewhere.
Unblocking the invisible blocker
Often what creates our communication problems is invisible to us at first glance. Struggling to speak and struggling to hold and move a pencil between two fingers might seem like two very different things, but our overall musculature system impacts the effectiveness of both and what is difficult in one, could very well be difficult in the other.
Understanding the invisible links between our fine motor skills, be they talking, whispering, writing, or playing an instrument and how their utility is affected by excess muscular tension in different parts of the body is the first step of awareness required to start the journey of re-educating the body into better muscular use – and in turn, to freeing up our fine motor skills again so that we can find freedom and simplicity in our communication and expressiveness.
The biggest barriers often show up in little things
Some of the largest barriers to success and happiness, whether professionally or in life generally are often found in the little things – sometimes so little that they can be easily overlooked.
But once you know the barrier, it creates the possibility of it being fully dismantled and in doing so, facilitating far greater ease and freedom of expression – and providing the clear path to achieving your true potential.
