Episode #96 – Naked Communication with Sage Hobbs

How would your life be different if you spoke authentically? Today we welcome Sage Hobbs, our guest on today’s episode of Financial Fluency. Sage is a coach, speaker, and author of Naked Communication: Courageously Create the Relationships You Really Want. And today, we’ll explore her book and how she turned her love of people and relationships into a fulfilling, rewarding career.

Sage says she always wanted to write a book. And once she made the commitment, she went for it. She started thinking about what fascinated her—and it was people. Sage began looking at where her passion and curiosity (human capacity and human potential) line up with her professionally—and again she saw that all of her career choices have been about people. Her strength is to connect people better with each other and themselves. And the rest is history!

Before writing her book, Sage visited Kenya and shortly after that landed her dream job as an inner-city school counselor. At 23, she was working at her dream job, and that’s where life took a sudden turn. At work one day, Sage felt a pea-sized lump on her collarbone. Doctors determined after her lymph node biopsy; she had cancer at 23. Battling cancer at a young age showed her how the community, friends, and family were there for her. It was in these years that Sage understood that life is fleeting and that she needed to make life the way she wanted it to be, that she got to decide.  

There are two things she recounts her mother saying to her during her bout with cancer:

• Let love in.
• It’s a generous act to allow people to contribute to you.

Sage admits that asking for help is really hard.  It was hard for her to ask for help and hard to allow others to help her. As humans, we make everything mean something. We make up a fictitious story in our heads. We make asking for help mean that we can’t handle it, we’re not worth it, we’re not strong enough, etc. Sage reiterates you can’t have full responsibility for your life until you can separate the two (fact and fiction).

Her book helps readers pull back all the layers of conditioning, automatic ways of being, patterns of behavior, and gives insight into how to show up in a more ‘naked’ way and have authentic conversations in four ways. To her, these qualities are the 4 C’s to communication:

• Clean
• Clear
• Compassionate
• Courageous  

Human interaction, as Sage says, is a desire all people crave. People are longing to be themselves, have others see them for that, and find depth and intimacy from a place of authenticity. To do this, you must pay attention and nurture the relationships you want to last. No matter how good you think you are at commutation, you can always improve.

Real Talk from Sage

“The first step is awareness. If you want to be naked, you have to be real with yourself.”

Sage’s Advice for Effective Communication

1. Look at yourself. If you don’t understand how you communicate already, it’s hard to change, shift, or evolve. You have to know if you’re more passive, assertive, direct, passive-aggressive, etc. You can evaluate this when you bite your tongue when you want to say something, but you don’t, or by looking at the way someone responds to you.
2. Know when to speak up, when not to speak up, and have a choice about it. It’s not always the time. If something is still raw, or someone’s angry, or the issues are still tender—that might mean it’s not the time to have a conversation. Be reflective and have a choice.
3. Everyone has conflicts. Always take responsibility for your part, but the doesn’t mean you let the other person off the hook. You should only apologize when you’ve done wrong.

For more information about Sage, her one-on-one guidance, and group coaching visit her directly on her website www.sagebhobbs.com, or follow her on social media.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sagebhobbs/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SageBHobbs

Instagram: @sagebhobbs

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sagebhobbs/

Remember you can highlight to share any text on this page, give it a whirl!

Resources:

Naked Communication: Courageously Create the Relationships You Really Want:

Get Sage’s FREE The ASK Formula cheat sheet here: http://www.sagebhobbs.com/ask-formula-cheat-sheet/

Discovery Call with Sage: http://www.sagebhobbs.com/scheduling/

The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help.