I recently joked with a friend that we may not have an office at Micro-Documentaries, but we haven’t been able to avoid our share of office politics!
As stress rises, some misinterpretations, friction and frustrations are more likely to emerge. It’s a dynamic familiar to companies virtual or not.
If our intention is to leverage our films for positive social change, then we also need to maintain an ongoing practice of skillful, nourishing and uplifting communications at the personal level. There are tried and true ways of doing this that have worked for hundreds of years. In The Art of Communicating, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Thich Nhat Han offers a simple, friendly, direct reminder.
How do we say what we mean in a way that the other person can really hear?
How can we listen with compassion and understanding?
These are questions we consider with every short film we produce, but they apply equally well to internal communication. Thich Nhat Han opens his book with these lines:
