Communication is defined as the exchange or means of sending or receiving of information. I think we can all agree that communication is an integral part of everyday life and without it, life would very quickly come to a standstill; there would be no meaningful relationships, no friendships. There would be no connections; either personal, professional or otherwise. Things just would not happen, no progress would be made, we would just be stuck with no real way to develop or learn or uplevel.

Communication is something we do every single day of our lives, and these days there are so many ways to communicate with others; email, text message, DM’s, video call, social media posts/reels/videos, face-to-face conversations, phone calls (remember those!!).

Communicating isn’t just restricted to the words we use. We communicate with our body language, our facial expressions, the tone of our voice and, in the case of the written word, USING CAPITAL LETTERS IS SURE TO GRAB READERS' ATTENTION, ted to the words we and punctuation is a great way to get your point across and convey certain emotions (hello multiple exclamation marks!!)

But having said that, even if you decide to do nothing, you may still be communicating a message to someone. It may not be your intention to communicate to that someone the message they are receiving, but they may receive it nonetheless. How often have you heard someone say “message received loud and clear” when a friend/love interest decides not to call them, or reply to their messages? So, doing nothing can also be a form of communication.

There are so many reasons why communication is important a few of which are:

It can enhance relationships – communication allows us to share our views + thoughts and share our experiences.

It can be the conduit for new relationships and friendships forming.

It allows us to connect to, and with, others.

But if we’re not careful we can end up achieving the opposite: we can diminish or even destroy relationships and friendships.

We can sabotage our own efforts at making new friends or meeting new people.

We can end up not having any meaningful connections.

And whilst all of what I’ve said is important, the communication I want to shine the light on today, is the communication we have with ourselves. That communication is probably the most important communication you will have today, tomorrow and forever after; because how you communication with/to yourself will inform how you show up and how you communicate with others.

Whilst I am very “switched on” and good when it comes to recognising when I’m about to go into a negative self-talk spiral + am having a poor self-image moment, what I hadn’t realised until very recently was that I hadn’t been paying attention to the non-action forms of communication that I was engaging in, and the unkind messages the non-action was subconsciously sending to myself.

Being unkind to yourself isn’t restricted to criticising yourself be it your physical appearance or your intellect, or to berating yourself (I’m such an idiot, I can’t believe I did that). Being unkind to yourself lies in the doubting, in the holding back, in the questioning. Being unkind to yourself is not having confidence in yourself + your abilities. Being unkind to yourself looks like comparing yourself unfavourably to other people. There is a myriad of other ways that you can be unkind to yourself without actually doing or saying anything.

Communicating with yourself like that, sending yourself messages like that will only serve to reinforce those thoughts (because the messages + thoughts you feed your brain, your brain will look to prove true), and then when you are served lots of evidence to prove true those thoughts + messages, you think it means they’re true and you end up living into that version of yourself, all the while creating more evidence for it. When in actual fact, what lies at the root of all of this, is that you just thought a really ill-advised thought. Put another way, you didn’t communicate with yourself in the best possible way.

So my message to you today is this: be careful what you are choosing not to do. Because in choosing not to do something, you could be reinforcing a belief that does not serve you. We think that there is safety in not choosing, in not doing, in not committing, in staying where we are. But doing nothing is a choice in and of itself. And as I said at the beginning, not doing something can still send a message – make sure the messages you are sending yourself are not keeping you stuck + helping you become stagnant, but are going to help you grow + flourish.

Journal prompt: what action am I not taking that I want to take? Explore what thoughts are stopping you from taking the action and I would encourage you to deconstruct + explore those thoughts to see where they came from and how you can start to reframe them.

As always, I would love to hear your takeaways on this – drop me a comment below or an email: kelly@roomformore.co

Until next time, have a great day.