The Resilient Mind - Develop Effective Communication - Jim Rohn

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

Jim Rohn was a renowned motivational speaker who has been widely regarded as one of the best in his field during his time. He had an incredible ability to inspire and motivate people from all walks of life with his speeches and teachings. One of his most notable achievements was serving as a mentor to Tony Robbins, one of the most successful and well-known motivational speakers in the world today.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to how to develop effective communication with Jim Rohn. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. The four ifs that make life worthwhile. Life is worthwhile, number one, if you learn. Life is worthwhile if you learn.

Your own experience can be a great teacher. The last three years, you've probably been doing it right or been doing it wrong. Mr. Schof pointed out to me when I was 25, said, don't ignore the last six years. Six years is a pretty good chunk of time to go over and evaluate and put it on the scales and say, it either weighs or it doesn't weigh. You're either on track or off track. Let's take a look at our own experience. Another big way to learn is from other people's experiences.

Might as well gather up someone else's experiences. OPE, we call it, other people's experiences. If somebody went through something for five years and they wrote a book and you could read the book in five days, Wouldn't that be an advantage? Well, yes, if you read the book. Now, this isn't easy stuff, right? This is not casual stuff. This is the extraordinary kind of learning and skills

that's necessary, I think, to gain the high life treasures. But I think it's worth it all. Small price to pay for treasure, the extra reading, the extra commitment to the excellence of learning. Life is worthwhile if you learn. Number two, life is worthwhile if you try. You got to try something with what you know.

Can you win the next game that's set up? I don't know. How are we going to know? You got to try. How else are we going to know whether you can be a winner in the next game? I don't know. Just make a commitment to try. When the final book on you is written, let it show your wins and let it show your losses, but don't let it show you didn't play.

How would you explain that? So you got to play. You got to try. See what you can do with your life. See what you can do with the next game. The key to life is to give it a try. I put the bar up three feet, ask the kids, who can jump three feet? I get a whole variety of response.

I don't think so. I'm not sure. I don't know. Yes, I can. Say, well, how are we going to know? You've got to take a run at it. I don't know any other way. You've just got to take a run at it.

Who knows if you can jump three feet till you try? Now if you try and knock the bar down, does that mean you can't jump three feet? No. Let me give you the next clue. Try it again. Try it over. Try it another time. Try it another way.

Try it with more speed. There's all kinds of ways to try. Number three. Life is worthwhile. If you stay, you've got to learn to hang in there. You've got to learn to stay from spring till fall. Many people plant in the spring and leave in the summer. They're gone.

First hot day. I thought, sure, John, had last a month. Say, where is he? I don't know. Somebody said, boom. And he quit. Where is it? I don't know. I'd see to win.

You've got to learn to stay. Just because you're behind in the first quarter, you can't leave. You've got to learn to stay and hang in there. Guy builds a foundation. And then he walks off, wanders away, and builds another foundation. He never stays, puts up the walls, and puts on the roof. You've got to learn to stay, hang in there. The last one.

Life is worthwhile if you care. Caring is an important human value. And I wrote, If you care at all, you'll get some results. If you care enough, you'll get incredible results. caring, to care for the day and to use its time, to care for the people and to help them with their possibilities, to care for the enterprise, its dignity and its reputation, and to care for yourself, to become all you can become, stretch as far as you can stretch, accomplish as much as you

can accomplish, become all that you can become caring. after you've got something good to say. Number two is obvious. Learn to say it well. Once you've got the information and the awareness and the understanding, the knowledge, now the key in good communication is how to translate it into meaningful word, emotions, feelings, phrases, sentences, paragraphs. It's very important now to be able to translate it. Learning to say it well. Now this is a whole subject in itself. This is worth a weekend of study. Let me just give you a short list of suggestions on learning to say it well. Number one, repetition. It just takes practice. I don't know any substitute for the practice. To learn any skill, you've just got to go through it again and

again and again. My first attempted lecturing, especially outside my own comfortable business circles, was pretty tough. Learning to say it well was a struggle for me. But I kept at it and kept at it. And now I've gotten better. I do one seminar called Challenge to Succeed. It's about four hours long and I can do it without any notes. Every once and while a person comes and says, you lectured this evening for four hours without any notes. How can you do that? I said it's very simple. I've done it a few thousand times. We call that simplicity. You just do it over and over and often. I've got a good question. How long do you want it to take to get good at what you do. You say not very long. Then you've got to do it often. Do it often.

Repetition starts the skill. Now, it also must be repetition with the objectivity of getting better. Because sometimes it's easy to be casual just about repetition and not get much better. How about the man who's been talking for 10 years, but he's making the same verbal errors he made 10 years ago? Or 10 years ago he said, I don't quite know how to put this. Ten years later he's saying, I don't quite know how to put this. We say, hey, 10 years is too long not to know how to put it. We can give you 10 hours not to know how to put it. You can stretch our patience and take 10 days not to know how to put it, but we can't give you 10 years.

10 years is too long not to make enough progress in better language skill. So, repetition with purpose. Purpose is to grow and to change, to develop, to expand, to make progress. Here's some other parts to saying it well. Sincerity. From the heart, with noble intent, wishing to bring value, that adds immeasurably to your ability to speak well, communicate well. Sincerity.

There's no substitute for sincerity. I can forgive you for a mistaken. judgment, but I can't forgive you for a mistaken intent. Next key part to saying it well, brevity. Part of the key is to be brief. You can't linger too long I've discovered in my lecturing and speaking around the world. Can't linger too long on any one point. Brevity.

I used to tell stories. Too long, too long. I get involved in a long, long story on and on. By the time I hit the punchline, people forgot how it started. Now it doesn't make sense. Too long. Here's why brevity is important. The human attention span is short.

You haven't got long to get it said before you lose your audience. Now, the best practice I know of here is practice on the kids because their attention span is really short, right? Underline, really. You talk to kids for 30 seconds. They say, how long is this going to take? I mean, they're already been out of shape, right? Looks like you're going to take forever to get to the point.

Get it said. brevity. Jesus, master communicator was probably the best. In selecting his team, he would look at somebody and say, follow me. That's brief. That's, all right? That's short. Now, how could you be so brief and yet be so effective? I think probably because of all that he was that he didn't have to say. Sometimes we try to make up in word what we lack in self-confident. So part of the key to being brief is personal development, personal growth, personal awareness, understanding self-worth. Now you can use the economy of words. And this is a good position to be in that what you are adds so much weight to what you say that you don't have to say very much.

but brevity is a good point on saying it well. Next is style. And there's all kinds of parts to style from body language and gestures to facial expressions and eyes and emotion. But style is very important. Here's part of the clue. It's not just the matter you cover, it's the manner in which you cover the matter. Style is important to attract someone's attention to emphasize the point. Now I've got a couple of good points here on style.

Be a student of style, but don't just copy someone's style. Make sure that the study of style become distinctly you. But it is also important to be a student of style. How people speak well, be a student of that. and then borrowing bits and pieces from people you admire and the way they can communicate, then make sure that all of that blended into you becomes your own distinctive style. But style is very important. Now there's a variety of styles.

Ancient story tells us of John the Baptist had a unique style. He came out of the desert dressed in camel's hair, and his diet was grasshoppers and wild honey. And he screamed and yelled and thundered curses on the king and other people. That was his style. They came to see John. I'm sure, right? I'm sure the word was out.

You got to come and see this guy. Not just what he said, but his style, I'm sure, was something to watch. So John had a unique style. Jesus, I'm sure, had probably a whole different style. But style is important to become uniquely John or to become uniquely you. But it's important to study your own style and say, how am I coming across in style? Should I learn to emphasize more?

Should I learn to be more emphatic? All these things concerning style. Next is vocabulary. Saying it well as proper choice of words. To build my early vocabulary, I used to put three or four words I didn't know on a card, put it up on the sun visor on my car, back to the same. in those days I traveled a lot by car. Sure enough, by the end of the day, I'd mastered two or three word. Vocabulary. Some of my friends took a survey among prisoners in New England several years ago.

They made a very important discovery, some rehabilitation program they were working on. But here's the discovery they made. There's definitely a relationship between vocabulary and behavior. The more limited the vocabulary, the more tendency to poor behavior. Isn't that amazing? that vocabulary would affect behavior? Now, if you think about it for a while, it makes sense. Here's why. Vocabulary is a way of seeing. One reason for vocabulary is to interpret what we see, to interpret what we hear,

the vocabulary of the mind, grapples with the words and the images that come to our mind. Now, if you've got a poor set of words and skills and tools with which to interpret, you can imagine the errors and the mistakes you'll make in judgment. And since vocabulary is a way of seeing, if you can't see well, you can imagine the errors you can make and how they compound as life unfold. We do two things with vocabulary. We interpret and we express. The words we have are the only words available to it. The words we know are the only tools available to us, to number one, interpret what's going on,

to interpret what's being said, and to express your heart and your mind. Now if you can't interpret well, and if you can't express well, you can imagine what a deterrent that is to the good life. And the extra treasures, the extra feelings, awareness, riches, power, influence. So it's very important to have a good vocabulary. So I would ask you, one of the most important books in your library should be the dictionary. Just go through the dictionary. The words are fascinating their origin and where they came from. Vocabulary.

Now here's the last part on saying it well. Don't forget to say it. Practice the art every chance you get. Try to say it well. It's easy to be lazy in language all day and not practice the gift and the art. Then when it comes time to make an important talk, to appeal to a child, we're missing the words and missing the sharpness and missing the vocabulary simply because we lack the practice of doing it every day.

If you want to get good at communication, you have to be aware of doing it every day as a practice session of getting better so that when the real important occasions arise, you will have the gift and you'll have the style, you'll have the sharpness and the clarity and the substance and the emotion.

I have a key phrase for you. Actions are no substitute for words. Don't fail to say it. Now, we've heard the old expression words are no substitute for action. That's true. Talk, talk, never act. That's not good.

But this also isn't good. Act, act, act, and never talk. We must be gifted with words if we want the full treasure of life. So practice every occasion you get. It's okay to send somebody flowers, but don't let flowers do all you're talking. Here's why. Flowers have a limited vocabulary.

About the best flowers can say is, you remembered. That's about the best, or you care. That's about all. Flowers don't say, you do incredible things to me. Nobody in this world affects me like you do. Now, see, flowers talk, but they don't say that. That you got to add in the card.

Right? That you got to add in person. So the next time you give flowers, say, just so my flowers won't do all the talking, let me add, and then put the gift of words. to work, to go along with the activity, and you will start to sense this whole growing excitement about using language to affect somebody, to translate feelings of heart and mind.

And the response you're going to get and the results you're going to get starts growing in measurable quantities. I'm just asking you to take the extra time to engage in these arts and practices. The gift of language. Communications, affecting people with words. So we've covered step one, have something good to say. Step two, say it well. Here's step three to good communications. Read your audience. It's very important to read and to pick up the signals of what's happening with your audience. Now when I first started lecturing outside my business circles, I had some problems here, reading my audience. I think my early audiences they all could have left halfway through and I'd have never known it. I was so intent on a

what I was saying that I was a bit unconscious of what was going on out there. Then I finally learned to look up, to watch, and see what's happening. We call this reading what's happening. My largest audience has been 10,000. I wasn't the only speaker, Art Link Letter, Paul Harvey, Dr. Peel, Ziglar, myself. We each had an hour. But we had 10,000 people. But now that was the first time I'd ever talked to 10,000 people.

Awesome event for me. You know, Paul Harvey, he didn't have any problems. Art Linklater, he didn't have any problems. But I had some problems. That first four or five minutes, right? 10,000 is a lot of people. And you've got to read fast. Right?

Because 10,000 people can turn on you quick. But learning to read, what's going on back there? What's happening? Now, it's also just as important to read a person, to read a child. If you want to be effective, you've got to get the feedback. You've got to pick up the signals to know whether to be stronger or whether to ease off, whether to change stories, change words, change language. All of this comes by a good ability to read your audience.

So let me give you some clues on reading. Number one is simply to listen. Part of reading is listening. You pick up a lot of clues as to what else to say, what all to say by being a good listener. From early times, I think we've learned to be a good speaker. You've got to be a good listener. That's where you pick up the information, is to listen, especially in a private conversation, a more informal conversation.

Good listening habits. That's part of reading. Number two, you got to read what you see. There's a good book called How to Read a Person Like a Book. It's a pretty good book by Nuremberg. And it's a study of body language. Now you can't get too deeply involved in this or you'll be so intent on reading body language that you may miss the point. But we can all, I think, use some help here and now some things are very obvious. You're talking to somebody and they've got their arms folded and their chin tucked down and they're frowning. That probably means, right, you've got your work cut out for you. You've got to reach deep into your bag of experiences and language because this one isn't going to be easy. So some body language is fairly obvious. If you're talking to somebody in there leaning

toward the door, that probably means something, right? It means you're going to have to get with it. You're not going to have an audience long. So part of it is just being conscious, right? Body language, reading what you see. Now kids are pretty easy to read because they don't even try to fake you out, right? You talk to kids and their staring out the window. I mean, they don't mind showing their total unconcern. But now here's what's more challenging. In a polite society, sometimes body language can be deceiving. If somebody while you're talking looks at you and smiles, you've got to make sure you don't misread that. Here's what we teach in leadership skill. Don't mistake courtesy for consent.

In a polite society, we've learned sometimes to be courteous, but that doesn't mean we buy the story. With somebody being polite, smiling and nodding, you've got to make sure you don't misread that and stop short of the full persuasion. Don't mistake kindness for acceptance. In a polite society, we've learned to be kind, but that doesn't mean we've accepted.

So part of this is a little more subtle in reading, in a polite society, whether or not somebody is buying your argument, if they're being persuaded by your presentation. So body language, picking up those signals. Now here's the one that's probably the most effective, but it's probably the most elusive, reading the emotional signals.

This is an area probably where the women have it over the men, picking up the emotional signals. I think men can learn these skills, but I think women have a lot of this automatically. Men can learn it, but it's something we all have to learn. Emotional signals, picking up the signals of whether to change your language, be sharper or to be softer, to go after a problem or to ease back and give it time to soak. Part of this is just picking up the feelings,

picking up the emotion, being sensitive to the situation. This is not easy stuff. This is extra learning stuff, extra skills, but this is called summit learning for those extra measures of rewards that come from communicating by learning these extra skills. So third, very important to read your audience. How are you coming across? What is the effect from a child to an auditorium full of people? Reading, reading. Here's the fourth step to good communication.

Number one, have something good to say. Number two, say it well. Number three, read your audience. Number four, intensity. Here now starts the power of what we say. Part of the strength of what we say is the words we choose. The greater part of the strength of what we say is the emotion that are loaded into the words. Here's what has power unmatched, words loaded with emotion.

There is no greater power. Words have an effect, but words loaded with emotion have an incredible effect. My words may reach you, but if I can't touch you with my spirit, If I can't touch you with my emotions, my feelings, my beliefs, then I probably haven't affected you very much. We might describe words like a little straight pin, right? Guy buys a shirt, it's got all these little pins in it, right? If I took one of those little straight pins and I threw it at you and it hits you in the face or the hand, you'd probably feel it, this little straight pin. That means I got you with my words.

But what if I took that little straight pin and wired it to the end of an iron bar? and I let you have it with that. See, I can drive the pin through your heart. Now, the reason I can do that is because the pin is the words, but the iron bar is the emotions, the feelings, the belief, the commitment, all that I am if I can put more of what I am

into what I say, no telling what miracle I can rot, no telling how much of an effect I can be. Real persuasion comes from putting you into what you say. But now here's part of the clue, and we call these extra refinement of leadership skills, learning to measure your emotions. That's very important to learn to measure your emotions. We teach, don't shoot a cannon at a rabbit.

It's effective, but you've got no more rabbit. It's called too much firepower for the occasion. You don't need an atomic explosion for a minor point. enough but not too much. We call this understanding how to measure the flow of your emotions to cover a point. Okay, but if it needs heavyweight stuff, you reach and get it. If it needs a milder approach, you learn how to measure it in milder, easier terms. But it's very important to measure your emotion, your feelings.

Now, what do we mean by intensity and emotions? Here it is. All of your experiences and how they've affected you. you. That's the sum total of your emotional content. Where you've been and what you've heard and what you've seen and who you've met and this whole panorama of life experiences for you up until now and how you've felt about all that. That we call the sum total of your emotions. Now the key is to learn how to measure all that and put it in effective amounts into the words you choose. So here's the key to effective communications. Well chosen words loaded with words. Loaded with

well-measured emotions. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening.