ESSENTIAL TIP: Feel.

Go to the Post Secret blog.  If you are not able to connect with some of the people who have shared their deepest, most wonderful, most horrific, most amusing secrets with the world, check your pulse.  Chances are real good that you're not alive and should start covering yourself with dirt.  Or better yet, maybe you should create a post card and send it in.  We are a species blessed with emotion, and yet we are largely embarrassed to show it.  Emotion is what connects us to each other and, at the end of the day, is actually the driving force behind getting things done. When we try to feel what others feel, we listen better, we connect better, we engage better, we stop thinking of others as assets, obstacles, allies, enemies, idiots, and political tools, and begin to see that they are people just like us, sometimes with the same agenda, sometimes with a different one.  It's not easy.  In fact, it's the hardest thing you'll ever do.  But if you want to be a good communicator, emotion is where you connect.  At Post Secret, you should feel tears.  If you don't, there's a real good chance that you suck as a communicator.  Work on feeling, and you work on living.