Life Lessons from Motorcycles: Seventy Five Tips for Connecting Through Communication

By Liz Jansen

Communication skills are the lifeblood of our relationships with others and, indeed, with life itself. They help us establish, maintain, and nourish healthy relationships. If we’re receptive to feedback, they also facilitate our personal growth.
The basic communication model is simple: there’s a feedback loop anchored by a sender and a receiver. Verbal and non-verbal messages are encoded by the sender and decoded by the receiver. Communication filters can significantly change the intent and effect of the original message and the response.
The immediacy and potential severity of the outcome when you misinterpret or ignore signs when you ride make your motorcycle an excellent teacher of effective communication skills—skills that help you connect with other people as well.
Learn their life lessons and enrich your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liz Jansen
• Release date: May 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9780993723728

Liz Jansen

Niagara native Liz Jansen was born into a German Mennonite culture, the granddaughter of Russian refugees. Since she began riding a motorcycle at age sixteen, she’s logged hundreds of thousands of miles of mostly solo riding across Canada and the United States. While Liz enjoys the rugged beauty of Ontario’s northern wilderness, she has a particular fondness for the open expanses of the Canadian prairies and Midwestern plains. Liz is a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada, the Non-Fiction Authors Association, the Alliance of Independent Authors, and the Independent Book Publishers Association. Crash Landing is her third book. She lives in Ontario with her cat, Measha, and Trudy, her Triumph Tiger motorcycle.

Book preview

LIFE LESSONS FROM MOTORCYCLES | SEVENTY-FIVE TIPS FOR CONNECTING THROUGH COMMUNICATION

Liz Jansen

Copyright © 2014 Liz Jansen

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-1-987853-02-5

Introduction

Communication skills are the lifeblood of our relationships with others and, indeed, with life itself. They help us establish, maintain, and nourish healthy relationships. If we’re receptive to feedback, they also facilitate our personal growth.

The basic communication model is simple: there’s a feedback loop anchored by a sender and a receiver. Verbal and non-verbal messages are encoded by the sender and decoded by the receiver. Communication filters can significantly change the intent and effect of the original message and the response.

The immediacy and potential severity of the outcome when you misinterpret or ignore signs when you ride make your motorcycle an excellent teacher of effective communication skills—skills that help you connect with other people as well.

Learn their life lessons and enrich your life.

Five Overarching Principles for Connecting Through Communication

These five principles form the groundwork for communicating effectively with others. If these are in place, the tips that follow fall into place more easily and make connecting with others that much simpler.

Be authentic.A motorcycle is very definite about what it is and what its role is. You are one of a kind, and the only one who carries your message. Others can sense when you’re speaking from your heart, and will relate to who you are, rather than who you are trying to emulate.

Communicate with certainty.There’s little room for error when you’re riding a motorcycle. Riding skills are only the beginning. You need to ride and make decisions with confidence in order for others