Podcast Recommendation

Rachel Clark, Founder of Lumina Australia, guides these conversations about communication with professional communicators so listeners will learn more about what works and why, across many different yet always human centred fields of practice.

Rachel is an NMAS Accredited Mediator who has worked for three decades with people in community organisations and education settings to build safer relationships.

Her motivation to start this podcast was both a fascination with the art of communication and how it can be used to build more peaceful connections between people, and to support her students to learn more about the subtleties of connecting with others in their pursuit of working most effectively and safely with people in the community.

Episode 1

Rachel introduces herself and goes into more detail about the podcast’s purpose and structure by answering her own questions, in advance of the interviews that follow.

In Episode 9 of Compelling Communicators we meet Frank Handy, an experienced lawyer and alternative dispute resolution practitioner who uses his communication skills to mediate situations of high conflict. We learn from Frank how communication is about an exchange of energy and an integration of experience.

Frank’s core value of self-awareness guides him in communication practices that seek to understand others first, and to know that the only change we can make is in ourselves, ultimately with possibilities of differences between us dissolving, so we are one, together.

You can read more about Frank’s work here, connect to him on LinkedIn

Key takeaways from Frank’s approach to communication across his wide range of conflict mediating experiences are:

• The importance of ‘whole person communication’
• The connection between self-awareness and self-regulation in integrating new perspectives
• The power of validating others’ experiences
• Listening non-judgmentally: being guided by ‘the silence in my head’
• And why asking ‘is there anything else’ unlocks parts of unexpressed thoughts critical to the exchange of ideas, or energy, in communication.