Communication is power

What we do in life is determined by how we communicate to ourselves. In the modern world, the quality of life is the quality of communication. What we picture and say to ourselves, how we move and use the muscles of our bodies and our facial expressions will determine how much of what we know we will use.

Often we get caught in the mental trap of seeing enormously successful people and thinking they are where they are because they have some special gift. Yet a closer look shows that the greatest gift that extraordinarily successful people have over the average person is their ability to get themselves to take action. It's a "gift" that any of us can develop within ourselves. After all, other people had the same knowledge Steve Jobs did. People other than Ted Turner could have figured out that cable had enormous economic potential. But Turner and Jobs were able to take action, and by doing so, they changed the way many of us experience the world.

We all produce two forms of communication from which the experience of our lives is fashioned. First, we conduct internal communications: those things we picture, say, and feel within ourselves. Second, we experience external communications: words, tonalities, facial expressions, body postures, and physical actions to communicate with the world. Every communication we make is an action, a cause set in motion. And all communications have some kind of effect on ourselves and on others.

Communication is power. Those who have mastered its effective use can change their own experience of the world and the world's experience of them. All behaviour and feelings find their original roots in some form of communication. Those who affect thoughts, feelings, and actions of the majority of us are those who know how to use this tool of power. Think of the people who have changed our world - John F. Kennedy, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King Jr., Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi. In a much grimmer vein, think of Hitler. What these men all had in common was that they were master communicators. They were able to take their vision, whether it was to transport people into space or to create a hate-filled Third Reich, and communicate it to others with such congruency that they influenced the way the masses thought and acted. Through their communication power, they changed the world.

In fact, isn't this also what sets a Spielberg, a Springsteen, an Iacocca, a Fonda, or a Reagan apart from others? Are they not masters of the tool of human communication, or influence? Just as these people are able to move masses with communication, it is the tool we also use to communicate with ourselves.