Listen As Though You're Discovering A New Country

Have you ever considered the quality of your listening? Can you hear someone else without automatically putting what they share through your own filters of assumptions and judgments? Can you listen with curiosity, and as a means to learn and gather insight, rather than to juxtapose what you hear with what you already think?

Transcript

This is a really powerful technique in your listening. When people share something with you, Even if you're involved, Even if they're saying, This is about you, Or this is my experience of you, It's true that feedback is usually 50% about the person they're giving the feedback to, And it's 50% about the person who's giving the feedback. And there is a powerful exercise in listening with a sort of lens of, This person is sharing with me how they experience the world. It's a sort of curious listening. What is this person telling me about what they believe, About their experiences, About the context of their life? How, In the way the person is sharing with me, Can I learn about how they see the world? And you and I have talked about this in the context of traveling. You go to a foreign country, And you're instinctively like, Oh, This is the way people live here, Oh, This is the way people relate here. But if you treat people like a country, In the same level of curiosity of listening, It makes it easier to hear the feedback and not take it personally. And as a novice traveler, You might travel somewhere and be like, Oh, We're doing everything wrong in the U. K. , And then create a complex around it. Because you go to this country where people seem to be happier living in a completely different way, And then the evolved traveler learns how to bring the embodiment of their culture with them without making themselves wrong when they experience the converse reality somewhere else.