If we consider communication a result producing activity, which it is, then we need to look at communication as we look at anything where we measure productivity: producing a result with some degree of reliability.

• Just like in productivity, your results depend, largely, on your attitude. Your attitude towards the task, and your attitude towards yourself.
• Just like in productivity, the order in which you do the tasks influences your results, and therefore your productivity. What you do first and what you do second…
• Just like in productivity, something is considered more important than something else… and you’ll either honor that or not… and your results will show that, or the lack of that honor.
• Just like in productivity, your skill level, your ability to see the big picture, your ability to use carrot and stick effectively, you’ll have compliance or non-compliance… you’ll communicate or you won’t…
• As in productivity, some strategies, some approaches, some skills cause more productivity… same in communication.
• The 80/20 rule applies to communication as well as it applies to productivity: most of what we say is part of the unproductive 80%, and often prevent us from saying the 20%, that has, at least a chance to produce the results…
• And when we evaluate our performance, more often than not, in my experience, what we blame is not the 20% missing, but the present and ineffective 80%.

It is not easy to see the forest for the trees.

I will, as is my habit, do a communication workshop, as a developmental course, only for my students… and I will continue doing, refine it, tweak it until I get it to the level where I can offer it to the general public… if that is what I’ll choose… Big if…

The most important angle for this course will be personal authority: to make others want to do what you want them to do…

Personal authority: make others WANT to do what you want them to do

That, most likely will include yourself… make yourself want to do what you want yourself to do… which is a funky way to say that you want to have personal authority with yourself as well.

Make yourself want to do what you want yourself to do

We’ll bring to the course what we learned in the Playground: what is your fixed way of being in life when things are not working, what are your expectations, what are your frustrations, what are you not saying… how you make the rackets run amok… using your life force to get you a big fat drama… and no results, no self-love, no health, no wealth, no fulfillment.

Only when we can own, fully, allow, fully what we learned about ourselves in the Playground, that we’ll be ready to learn to make things happen… either in communication or by doing…

Q: How long should this course be?

It should be as long as it takes…

Q: How should I price it?

I should price it low for my students… so they all can participate.

Q: Shall I accept barter as partial or full payment?

yes. You can do work for me, at street price, until you pay off your course.

Q: What could students do now?

Start thinking of what you could do for me…

For example, Wendy learned how to chop up long audios and make and post podcasts from short segments.

On fiverr.com you can get a top notch podcast editor for $20 for 45 minute long podcasts, who do a lot more than just listen and edit the audio… So for the 90 minute long Sunday Rants I would pay providers on Fiverr $40…

So when I gave Wendy an hour long coaching session in return, I overpaid her by about five times.

So using market prices is not a dis-valuing you as a person, it is valuing the work as the market values it.

You will need to handle your overinflated self-importance, and see if you are willing to value your output as the market does… It will be hard for most of you.

I once, long time ago, traded with a call-girl, advertising in my magazine for her cleaning my office. In her world an hour of her time was buying the ad… $200… even though she wasn’t doing for me what she did for her clients… sorry for the off-color issue… it is your issue. Office cleaning is valued at $15 and hour, hooker work is valued at $200 plus plus an hour.

It is not your time doing something else… it is your time doing what I need… the service.

OK… as you can see, I am just doing my thinking in writing… so just stay with me.

Another important element of a course, any course, is the title.

Back in 1987 I did a course called “Productivity as Accomplishment”

It was an inexpensive course, three evenings, one week apart. It was a video course facilitated by a guy… some guy.

In it there were many exercises, but the essence of the course was to pick someone for whom you want to cause productivity… Of course that was a little disappointing, after all I wanted to learn to cause my own productivity… but what the heck, I picked a guy I didn’t particularly cared for, whose increase in productivity wasn’t going to matter to me. I was stingy as we all are…

So I picked Len Church. He was a black dude from a Caribbean island, Trinidad. I knew him from Landmark. He had a driving service for sick people, to drive them to doctors’ appointments.

In the course we were asked to DECLARE ourselves, in fact our Self, as an accountability for our person.

For me this was: “Who I am is the accountability for Len Church’s productivity”

Not my name, not my story, not my concerns, not my psychology, not my profession… not all the things I knew how to be.

I got home and I called Len, and told him. He got really angry and threatened me. I said… I don’t care what you say, who I am the acountability for your productivity… period.

I was scared, but I stuck to my new identity, my new Self.

Next day he came to my house and put his fist under my nose… but I didn’t change my mind.

A week later he called me to report to me on his totally unexpected results. I said: OK.

Two weeks later he asked me to marry him… His results in this business were through the roof.

I said no… and that was it. The course was over, and I stopped being the accountability for his productivity… and to prove a point, his productivity went back to nothing.

By the way, my results weren’t typical…

Now, what does this course and the totally unexpected, unintended result have to do with communication?

80% of communication is not words. It is not talking. It is in the invisible realm. This is why it is so hard to teach. Mainly because it requires self-awareness, insights, honesty, responsibility that is a rare commodity.

This is why I don’t plan to teach the course to people at large in the beginning… and maybe not even ever!

Without the training in the Playground, without the discoveries about yourself in the Playground you’ll never become like the dog-mother in that youtube video…

When I listen to my students and their partner calls, the most missing ingredient for a successful life IS communication… Not talk. Mind you, you talk enough, really. In fact you talk too much.

And as long as you think talking is communication, you are spending all your energy on the ineffective 80%, while none on the crucial 20%.

Of course there is the 5% of the 80%… the few minutes, few sentences of speaking, that IS effective: very very very few words.

Watch the dog mother bark only a few times… And watch yourself yapping away…

We are like trained monkeys… being trained at what doesn’t matter. Big sigh…

Bummer, eh?

And another video: how a dog father is different from you or your father: a dog father TRAINS the pups to first follow him, trust him, and then follow him into the water…

NOT how you live, is it?

Priceless lesson…

Speaking the language of life… showing how easy it is to get in and get out… NEVER forcing anyone to obey…

Read the original article: Shall I create a communication course for you?