Sharmilla Fassbender believes better communication starts with something most of us think we already know how to do
by George Cassidy Payne
Sharmilla Fassbender has a word from her childhood in Malaysia that she still struggles to explain in English.
Ilham is commonly translated as “inspiration.” But Fassbender thinks that misses an important part of its meaning. To her, it suggests something that comes to you rather than something you go looking for.
That distinction has stayed with her.
Fassbender lives in Dansville, not far from Conesus Lake, and works as a communication and emotional-intelligence trainer. In May 2025, she founded The Heartspace Collective, where she works with organizations and individuals on communication, workplace relationships and emotional well-being.
Much of what she teaches comes down to something surprisingly basic.
Listen.
Not just waiting for your turn to talk. Not listening while composing a response in your head. Actually listening to another person and considering that their experience may be different from yours.
“We tend to train people to communicate by teaching them what to say,” Fassbender says. “How to phrase things. How to respond.”
She would rather spend more time on the other side of the conversation.
“I like to focus on the listening aspect of communication,” she says. “It takes work.”
Fassbender’s interest in communication was shaped by moving between cultures. She grew up in Malaysia, a country she describes as a cultural melting pot influenced by Malay, Chinese, Indian, Portuguese, Dutch and British traditions. Her great-grandfather came from India.
After high school, she moved to Australia for college. Sixteen years ago, she came to the United States with her husband, who had served in the military.
Each move meant learning a new environment and, in some cases, learning that familiar behaviors did not necessarily carry familiar meanings.
“When something is communicated in one way, it may not be that way,” she says. “You have to realize that how things land can be different based on their worldview, and their lens.”
She remembers being told by a man that nobody would take her seriously because she looked young.
He apparently intended it as a compliment.
“I have always looked young for my age,” she says. “That was supposed to be a compliment. But I didn’t take it that way.”
The experience stayed with her because it illustrated a problem she sees repeatedly in workplaces: people tend to judge communication by what they intended rather than by how it was received.
Those two things aren’t always the same.
Listening to the people on the front line
Fassbender’s work with The Heartspace Collective is particularly focused on frontline and support employees.
These are the people who often deal directly with the public, patients, students, customers and families. They may be the first people to hear a complaint or the ones asked to handle a problem when a situation has already become difficult.
“They are the forgotten ones,” Fassbender says.
In her experience, organizations can become so focused on meeting goals, satisfying boards and getting through the day’s work that they overlook the people carrying much of the emotional weight.
“Everyone is busy getting the big things done, yet it is the frontline who needs the help,” she says.
The consequences aren’t always dramatic.
Sometimes an employee simply becomes quieter.
They stop volunteering ideas. They stop asking questions. They do what is required and nothing more.
Eventually, they may leave.
Fassbender says that organizations often respond to turnover by filling the vacant position without asking what happened to the person who left.
She sees burnout as something that develops over time.
“They get checked out. They do not feel like themselves anymore,” she says.
If someone spends the workday dealing with other people’s frustrations and then goes home without finding a way to decompress, the stress can follow them.
“When you do not enjoy the way you work, and you feel completely drained, and you do not have the energy to do that, you hate what you do at work, you do not decompress at home,” she says. “It is a vicious cycle.”
Fassbender’s approach with managers is not to arrive with a list of instructions.
She asks questions.
If a department keeps experiencing the same problems, she tries to help the people in charge recognize the pattern themselves.
“I help them see the patterns,” she says. “I ask them questions where it gets them there. They can pinpoint the issues on their own.”
She compares it to talking with someone about a habit that may not be serving them.
“You can’t tell someone not to eat something because it is bad for you,” she says. “But you can ask them how it makes them feel after they eat it.”
That is the approach she tries to bring to organizational work: give people enough room to recognize something for themselves.
What moving between cultures taught her
Fassbender’s background also informs the way she thinks about cultural differences.
Growing up in Malaysia, she was accustomed to a culture in which hospitality and making people comfortable could be especially important.
“When you understand what the culture finds valuable, you change your approach,” she says.
She contrasts that with what she has experienced in Australia and the United States, where individual boundaries and personal comfort can sometimes be emphasized differently.
The differences can show up in ordinary situations.
Someone may believe they are being considerate while another person experiences the same behavior as intrusive. One person may consider directness respectful; another may hear it as rude.
There isn’t always an easy answer.
“You have to take this into consideration,” Fassbender says.
Her counseling background also influences her work. She earned a master’s degree in counseling and mental health counseling from the University of South Australia.
She brings that training into conversations about emotional intelligence, but she doesn’t believe people need to become perfect communicators.
In fact, she doesn’t think such a thing exists.
Four children, four ways of communicating
Fassbender is also a mother of four, and parenting has given her plenty of opportunities to test her ideas about communication.
Her children have different personalities, she says, so she doesn’t talk to all of them in exactly the same way.
“My oldest girl is very much, give me the facts, I give her the facts,” she says. “My other son needs to know that our relationship is okay first. We can say the same thing but we may need to change the language.”
That doesn’t mean avoiding difficult conversations.
Fassbender believes children need to see adults acknowledge mistakes.
“We are going to have disagreements,” she says. “How we come back is the biggest thing we can do for our children.”
She sometimes returns to her children after a disagreement and tells them how she felt before asking how they experienced the situation.
“I do this as a parent all the time,” she says. “I will go to them and I say, this is how I felt, and I invite them to tell me their part.”
That willingness to return to a conversation is important to her.
Relationships, she says, are not maintained by avoiding every disagreement. They are maintained by being willing to come back afterward.
Why she isn’t afraid of conflict
Fassbender grew up in a culture where maintaining harmony could be important. Her experiences have nevertheless led her to believe that avoiding conflict isn’t necessarily the same as creating peace.
“Conflict: It is not bad,” she says. “It is about finding the courage to have hard conversations, to show up with authenticity.”
She sees a similar problem in the way people sometimes handle disagreements online.
Instead of talking directly to someone, people may take the dispute to Facebook or another social media platform.
“At the end of the day, that is just avoidance, rather than fixing the problem,” she says. “The key is to have the conversation.”
She isn’t dismissive of social media. She has seen people use it to encourage one another, organize around causes and offer support.
But online communication has limitations.
A person can read a sentence and make assumptions about the tone. A facial expression isn’t there to provide additional information. A pause cannot be heard.
That brings Fassbender to another subject she has been thinking about lately: artificial intelligence.
What happens when technology does the listening?
Fassbender isn’t opposed to artificial intelligence.
What concerns her is the possibility that convenience could make people less practiced at doing things for themselves.
She thinks about the small things people communicate without saying anything.
“Expressions, real expression, even the slight twitch of an eye, that is warmth,” she says. “That is important for growth.”
Human beings don’t learn only by collecting information. They learn through experience, mistakes and relationships.
“Innovation is such a human experience,” she says. “Robots are only fed information. We learn from experiences.”
Her concern is not that technology will suddenly eliminate human interaction.
It is that people might gradually become less attentive to the interaction that remains.
“I’m not anti AI,” she says. “However, I do think we have to be intentional with how we use it, not make ourselves complacent with it.”
Being willing to change your mind
Fassbender’s thinking about communication also connects with a book she recommends, The Courage to Be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi, which draws on the psychology of Alfred Adler.
One idea she takes from Adler is that people are both individuals and members of communities.
“Adler was emphatic about how we are more than just us,” Fassbender says. “Adler talks about us being multifaceted, we are community-based individuals.”
That can create a difficult balance.
We want to be ourselves, but we also have to live with other people.
For Fassbender, remaining authentic doesn’t mean refusing to accept criticism or feedback.
“The key is not to change yourself. We have to learn how to absorb feedback,” she says.
She points to her own life as evidence.
“I do not have some of the same views as I did twenty years ago.”
That may be one of the harder parts of listening: accepting that what we hear might actually change us.
It is easy to listen when someone confirms what we already believe.
It is considerably harder when they don’t.
That is where Fassbender’s idea of ilham comes back into the conversation. Inspiration, in her understanding of the word, isn’t always something we generate.
Sometimes it is something another person gives us without knowing they have done so.
It might happen during a difficult conversation at work. It might happen while talking with a child. It might happen when someone from another culture challenges an assumption we didn’t realize we had.
Or it might happen in an ordinary conversation near home, when someone says something that makes us stop for a moment and reconsider.
Fassbender believes that kind of listening requires practice.
It also requires a little humility.
“We have to learn how to absorb feedback,” she says.
For someone who has lived in Malaysia, Australia and the United States, and now makes her home in the Finger Lakes, that lesson has been repeated in different forms throughout her life.
The word ilham may not have a perfect English translation.
But Fassbender knows what it asks of us.
Pay attention.
Stay curious.
And leave a little room for the possibility that someone else has something to teach you.
