Hello, and welcome back. 

Today we'll be talking about communicating with mindfulness. Before we get started, I'd like to ask you to just reflect what does mindful communication mean for you? And specifically, how mindful, do you think that you are in your daily communication with others? Well, today, we'll be looking at two of the biggest barriers to effective communication. And then we'll provide you with some very specific strategies on how to improve your communication by applying mindfulness, both in terms of how we receive information from others, and also how we share information with others. So let's get started. To begin, what we'll do is we'll actually have a look at a very typical office scene, I'd like to introduce you to Peter in the blue shirt, and John in the white shirt. And if you look from the outside, it looks like they're having a very effective communication. 

But let's just suppose that we had the opportunity to look into their minds. And maybe we'd get a little bit of a different view. You see, because Peter right now is thinking how I might have time for coffee when he's done. And John is actually thinking, oh, did I cancel that meeting later today? But that's not all. The next thought that comes into Peters mind is all I've heard this so many times before. And John's not doing that much better. He's thinking, here it comes. He always talks like that. 

Do you recognize any of this, from your own personal experience, these really represent the two most common barriers to effective communication. The first two are really about the wandering mind. As we've talked about, in earlier weeks, our minds have this natural tendency to really not be present, with whatever we're actually doing.

So when we're with somebody, and we're trying to have an effective conversation, but our minds are thinking about things like coffee, or meetings that need to be cancelled, it really prevents us from fully being present with the person that we're with. And then the second barrier to effective communication is habitual perception. That's that tendency of the mind to lock in to something that it's seen the first time, and the next time it sees it has a very difficult time looking at it with a fresh perspective. And that's what we often do, particularly in an office environment, where we see people as we've always seen them, and we hear them as we've always heard them. 

And we don't always have that ability to have a beginner's mind. And really listen, perhaps this time, they may be saying something different. So I'll just pause there and ask you to just consider for a second, can you relate to these two barriers? Do you see this happening in your own daily work? Most people would say yes. So now we'd like to say, well, given these barriers, how can we train ourselves and apply mindfulness into our communication, so that we can be more effective. So for that, we really need to look at the two sides of communication. Of course, there's the sending side.

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