I think communication is the most important thing that we as humans can learn. I would even call it THE key skill for the future of humanity. This is why I gave this subject a space in my portfolio.
We learn so many things in school – we learn how to calculate, how to build houses, how to drive a car – but there is no subject in school about how to express our feelings and communicate them with others in a peaceful and successful way.
To be honest I come from a family where communication wasn’t that great and intentions and emotions were never communicated in a clear and concious way. This led to many misunderstandings, unsolved conflicts, breakups, etc. But I am a very intuitive person so I felt quite early that something important is hidden in the way we communicate and that it can have a major influence on the outcome of our relationships. So I started watching more closely what was going on around me. Since then my interest in communication has been following me wherever I go and what I found on my way helps me more than anything else I learned in my life.
As an also quite analytical person I started to draw my conclusions from the things that I observed and went deeper into the field starting my studies in psychology and sociology at the Freie University in Berlin. There I learned theories about the human nature, its behavior, needs, emotions, drives, relations, etc. As I compared those theories with the things that I saw happening in real life my intuition told me that sheer theory alone was not enough to understand communication as a whole.
So I left university and entered the field of practical work with children and young adults. There I could gain practical experience and verify the theories I learned at university.
During this time I also studied Marshal B. Rosenberg´s method of nonviolent communication and implemented it in my way of communicating.
Since then many years have passed and in my work I could really see what a difference it makes the way you communicate. It is almost like magic how what you say can change how people react in an enormous way. How empathy and true listening open doors between us that seem to have been blocked. How it can connect us rather then end up in conflict. How important it is to know ourselves and our feelings and express them to others, so that they can understand what we want and need.
I truly believe that communication is THE key skill for the future and this is why I gave it a space in my portfolio. And I truly believe that we should teach it to our children more than anything else.
