Seldom do you consider that positive communication practices are essential to acquiring and maintaining the most valued aspects of your life including, perhaps most importantly, good health. Often talk about a “healthier society” centers on such features as cessation of smoking, proper diet, exercise, and access to medical care. Rarely does the discussion emphasize the inextricable link between the quality of communication and the quality of health. Through this book, the authors hope you will come to understand this extraordinarily important interaction and optimize your health through their keys to healthy communication practices.

• Key # One—Authenticity

• Authenticity involves honesty, trust, truth, openness and reliability. Authentic behavior is likely to be met in kind and result in good will and reciprocated trust.

• Key # Two—Empathy

• Empathy is the capacity to understand, feel, and accept the other. Not only should in “we walk in the other’s shoes,” we must think and feel as they do to fully understand and engage.

• Key # Three—Empowerment

• Empowerment means the freedom to make decisions and act as one chooses guided by legal and ethical principles and, conversely, freedom from control and manipulation