I want my words to be like missiles — bang on target. How do I become a good communicator? —
Swarup, 19.
Good communication isn’t like a mere missile. To continue in your military jargon, it’s much more advanced, like a guided missile. The mind of your target audience keeps moving and shifting all the time. If you just regurgitate your rehearsed speech you’ll soon find they have moved away inside their heads. So create a guided missile in your head. Something with eyes and ears and a bit of horse sense to give you feedback when you lose direction.
How do you learn to use that feedback? I suggest you begin your first communication exercise by keeping your eyes and ears wide open and your mouth tightly shut. Simply observe people. How do you relate to what you observe? Good question. You don’t relate. You simply observe. At some point the subconscious knowledge levels in your head will rise enough and start flowing.
Effective communication is always like a smart missile with a camera at the nose and a remote pilot controlling a joystick. It has the power to move wherever your target is moving and swiftly detonate inside your target’s mind.
That’s just the entry level of communication though. To adepts, there is a higher level. The rare and prized “bunker buster”. Your missile can penetrate the hardened concrete of the target’s prejudices and reorient their opinion. That is the communication skill of Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s play. He started off by facing a hostile crowd, and by use of choice words managed to turn them over to his side. To get to this stage you need a lot of practise and self-knowledge. The more you know about who you are, the more you learn about who they are. The more aware you become of the working of your inner mind, the more power your words acquire, the greater devastation it creates in your audience’s minds.
So while good communication can make them think, excellent communication can make them rethink, and devastatingly effective communication can make them stop thinking completely.
The true champion — the mother of all weapons, the ‘Daisy Cutter’. This is the power of a Buddha, whose words have kept resonating through millennia. These are people who understood the infinity inside themselves so well that they could penetrate the deepest layers inside our own beings, layers we still know nothing about, people who turned the art of communication upside down so that you start purifying yourself in order to reach Him for you sense that He is already in you. End of lecture. All the theory in the world is of no use till you start practising.