4 tips that make you more authentic and ensure more connection
In my coaching practice, the following behaviors and communication are often discussed. By gaining insight into yourself and really daring to look at how you do things, you can take a step in your development and growth. You become closer to yourself and it gives the opportunity to deepen your relationships.
1. Be your own starting point in life.
We sometimes have the tendency to place the starting point with the other person. For example, we think, if the opportunity arises, I will bring up something that is bothering me or tell me that I have feelings of love.
You can turn this around by creating the opportunity with someone yourself. For example, you tell the other person that you would appreciate it if they would take some time to discuss something.
It is crucial that you take your own feeling seriously, that that feeling is allowed and that you feel your own impulse. You have no influence on how the other person reacts and receives you. Which of course makes it exciting, but does not have to detract from your own feeling. You continue to find something difficult or those feelings of love are simply there, regardless of the reaction you get to it.
By increasingly becoming the starting point for your own life, you give yourself space for two things and you grow in the following:
• You become more aware of your own creative power
• Your feelings are allowed and you increasingly follow the impulses from within, which makes you more authentic
2. Investigate where something actually started and understand this more and more.
For example, you arrive somewhere with a load, because a while before you were annoyed by a comment or something you saw or heard hit you hard. This could be anything that you do not always have insight into. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with the person you happen to meet and who gets the load on his plate.
For example, you are frustrated because you let yourself be pushed for an annoying job at work (and allowed this to happen). Once home, your partner gets the full brunt for saying something wrong.
By investigating this (and it can be very subtle, someone who has just crossed your boundary), you gain insight and you can appropriate this. You can apologize to the person who took the brunt of you and, if necessary, explain what is going on. Instead of arguing, it provides an opportunity to deepen your relationship and invite the other person to really come.
3. Understand passive aggression.
We all experience passive aggression a lot and it can have a devastating effect. Passive aggression gives meaning to what you say and do and always ends up on the other side. For example, you slam the refrigerator just a little too hard to show that you disagree. You let the other person feel that you are not happy.
Or you don’t say something freely and with charge. The other person is then put away and an open conversation is no longer possible. For example, pay attention to your eyes on yourself or others, how do you look? Is your judgment already visible in your gaze? And with your voice and pitch you can show a lot about what you think about something between the lines.
Gaining insight into when you or the other person uses passive aggression in communication, verbally or non-verbally, can yield a lot of benefits. It gives the opportunity to get past this and really hear (and be heard) the other person and gives the opportunity for deeper connections.
4. Have the willingness to see what lies beneath a conflict or pattern.
Dare to point the finger at yourself instead of at others. For example, why do you get flight tendencies in your love relationship? The easiest thing to do is to point at the other person and criticize, but perhaps you yourself have difficulty with bonding and intimacy and, deep down, you find it very exciting to give of yourself.
By exploring and owning this and then allowing the feeling, you can make a turn and move beyond the pattern. This provides you with self-insight, provides the opportunity for growth and you understand yourself more. The connection with yourself becomes stronger and therefore also with the others around you.
Instead of condemning this, it is important to be gentle and look at yourself and others with compassion. We are all on our own path and learn by experiencing and really daring to see what happens.