To really communicate well and touch a wide range of people, you must be able to relate to a wide range of experiences. They’ve got to be part of you. Being touched by a wide range of human experience is an exercise in sensitivity training.
To really be able to reach people and teach them with words and ideas and emotion, we’ve got to enter this area of sensitivity. Sensitivity involves being touched, being affected by the things that happen in our own lives as well as those of other people. This is part of the heavyweight stuff that has a strong impact on our language and communication.
I (Jim Rohn) have always lived a rather sheltered life, so I’ve had to really work on this. What do I know about tragedy? I’ve never had any tragedy.
But part of life is tragic–and if you don’t at least try to understand this extremely sorrowful side, your life is left a bit shallow. When you live such a sheltered life, you just have to try to go outside of your own small world and allow yourself to be touched by someone else’s experience. You can’t really know what anyone else’s life is like until you live it, but at least you can try to understand. And if you do your homework in this area of sensitivity, you’ll gain the kind of depth that enhances your conversation and your communication.
When I lived in northern California, I used to go to San Francisco two or three times a year and spend a day in the Tenderloin. For a farm boy from Idaho, that Tenderloin was quite an experience. I got to see what I call “the other side.” I walked the streets where the lonely people walk and ate where they ate. After listening to some of their stories, I came away with a whole new sense of the great distance between failure and success, goodness and evil, despair and joy.
I also came away with a greater sense of value, because the true blessings of life are illuminated by the contrasts. It’s hard to genuinely appreciate winning until you’ve done some losing. It’s hard to appreciate succeeding until you’ve done some failing. And once you’ve done some failing, success takes on even more worth and value.
During one of my visits to the Tenderloin, I met a bartender named Frank. Frank sees more tragedy in a week than most people see in a lifetime. One day, Frank and I were talking, and he pointed out a lady sitting on a barstool. He asked me, “How old do you think she is?” I answered, “She’s forty-five.”
Frank shook his head. “No, she’s twenty-five. Her name is Cookie. She used to be a dancer back in the go-go days, but then she developed some kind of bone disease in her legs and her hips. She’s had all kinds of operations with bolts and pins trying to hold her together. Now she’s crippled, and she can hardly walk, so her go-go days are over.” Sure enough, Cookie seemed very crippled.
Frank continued, “Cookie also has a little boy who’s five years old and dying of leukemia. So she comes here several times a week, sits on that bar stool, and plays a little music to try to cheer herself up. She usually drinks far too much. I have to call a taxi to come and take her home.”
Cookie’s story made me think. Why did her life work out like that while my life worked out like it has? Why do I get to travel around the world while Cookie finds it hard to even get home? That kind of exposure, that kind of sensitivity, that kind of study can really open your eyes.
Try to let those experiences touch you. Let them affect you, let them educate you, let them give you a broader range of emotional wealth and worth. Those extra observations will start showing up in the way you express yourself verbally, and you’ll be able to touch people that you couldn’t touch before. You’ll be able to reach people you couldn’t reach before. Your words will have more drawing power than ever before once you witness some of these experiences.
Ask yourself, “What could I do and what experiences could I engage in that would give me a broader understanding of human suffering as well as human joy? How can I become more sensitive to the problems in life as well as the triumphs, the sorrows as well as the joys, the failures as well as the successes?” By answering those questions and then following through on the answers, you will greatly enhance your ability to touch somebody else.
* Source: Leading an Inspired Life by Jim Rohn