Bodytalk

Today I discovered, that I experience a difference between talking with my mouth and talking with my hands. That may sound a bit like an open door, but I'm going to elaborate. 

 

My mother tongue is Dutch. In fact, maybe my mother tongue is dialect. . But so as not to make it completely immediately complex and more complicated than this already is, I'll just keep it Dutch for now. You can also discus about how my Dutch is, because as much as I would like to hide it (which I no longer do, I have left that era behind me), you can hear my dialect, I have a nice local accent. 

 

However, now, because of my own business I have to deal a lot with people who speak English. And even though I can speak quite a bit of English, there is always a brake on it. This means that when I speak to someone online or via voicemessage, I always feel that I have to express my intuition and the real words that my body passes on to me via the translation machine in my head. The "Mary translate" shall we say. Pretty annoying and exasperating, because I notice that then I no longer really have the feeling with the things I say. Then an in-between is needed which ensures that I don't let my body and my voice speak, but my mind. And that is always much more rational and businesslike and also more distant than when I speak from my body, from my accessible and easy mother tongue. 

 

The effect is that sometimes I have the idea that I am listening to someone else translating what my own self wants to tell me. A bit like having a conversation with one of those bots when you want to ask a question at a company about something you bought. Then you get a bot that then answers the most frequently asked questions for you. And these are always these crazy mechanically things. To me, this is the downside of innovation and robotics. It's not real. It doesn't get to the feeling. 

 

And now that I experienced that and actually became aware of this, I could also suddenly let go of that feeling. I could see that the intermediate step that my head makes is not convenient for myself, but also not convenient for the client that I then have contact with. Because those therefore get the answer from my internal bot. And not from my intuition and from my genuine insights.

 

When I expressed this to that client today, I received a huge compliment. He felt seen in the fact that I wanted to approach him as a human being. That that was what touched him and actually did him good. And that touched me in return. 

 

Bodytalk and mindtalk are two different things. Mindtalk comes from your mind, your ratio. Bodytalk comes from your heart.

 

I like to speak from my heart. And if that means that for English clients I prefer to use the keyboard to speak my heart rather than the voice recorder or the online meeting, that's what I choose to do. When you learn to embrace your limitations, only then can you see what your heart has to offer.