Undelivered Communications
Sap our Energy and Impede our Effectiveness
By Leslie Reynolds-Benns, PhD,
www.lesliereynoldsbenns.com

Are you finding yourself tired and unable to get through the work on your desk? Have you no energy when you return home at night? Are your children’s demands too much for you to bear. Do you just not feel like your old self anymore or like you think you ought to feel?

If so, look at what you haven’t been communicating. What needs to be said and hasn’t been?

Many of us have difficulty deciding what we need to say and what we need to just let go. If you have a third option: What you need to just hold onto, this report is definitely for you. Because I maintain that undelivered communications always kill our aliveness.

May I give a personal example: After I’d been married a couple of years, I discovered that I had slowly lost my energy. After an unsuccessful (Very unsuccessful, but that’s another story.) trial attempt at anti-depressants, I took my problem to God in meditation. I got my answer. I had things I needed to communicate.

That was frustrating for me. In adjusting to my new marriage, I had found my husband quite reactive to things I said. (That’s putting it mildly. He was throwing temper tantrums the moment I began on some subjects. He’d previously had a daughter and a grandson living with him and had been king of the castle.) So, I divided my communications into three categories: Must Be Communicated, Wait until He’s in a Good Mood, and Don’t Touch that Subject. With lots of issues, I’d found over the years, that not everything needed to be communicated in a relationship, but I saw that I wasn’t making that decision, I was being trained like a new puppy dog!

The next day, I told my husband in the morning that there were some things I’d like to talk about. When he returned home in the afternoon, I sat down, suggested that we pray together, and explained what had happened with me. I had made a list of items, and it was only three or four long. I communicated those things. He got what I said. And that was it. I had an immediate surge of energy. It has proven to be natural energy not the adrenaline rush we get from accomplishing a feared task.

And I saw the tremendous energy it takes to keep something down. It wasn’t just the main subject that I was suppressing but any related subjects. And there were many reminders during any given day. I was selling myself and my aliveness for a little peace in the house. And I got my courage to hang in there on future subjects. When he resisted hearing something, I said that because I didn’t want to lose my aliveness again, I would return to it when he could hear it. And I did.

What are you withholding? What secrets are you keeping? With what people are you more comfortable ignoring than communicating? With whom do you avoid subjects? What subjects have you dropped because they ‘don’t really matter?’ Who do you think doesn’t matter? Are you afraid or losing your job or your marriage? If the job is more important than your energy and your life, it’s likely that you are downplaying your abilities. Right up front, it would be easy to say to whomever you needed to communicate, “I’ve found I was hesitant to communicate something because I was afraid I might lose my job.” It’s much more expensive to train and hire a new person than to keep you.

Take a look and see. You may find that you have way more energy than you thought you did. What a gift to you and the world.

Feel free to call or email with questions 801.531.0600