I’ve been meaning to do a podcast about listening for a while. If you commit to nothing else, this skill can bring an incredible amount of stillness and meaning into your life, improve relationships, and help you help others and see them in a powerful light.
True listening doesn’t let someone slide into victim mentality. You remove yourself as the rescuer and place yourself in a grounded energy state.
When you listen simply to receive energy (and maybe imagine that energy moving through your body down through your feet and into the ground), the other person changes the way they experience their stress.
In this episode I talk a bit about the origins of my interest in listening as a skill and some simple exercises about how to begin. I do recommend a container for practice, because it’s harder to “go live” so to speak with any new skill you’re trying to develop.
Exercise one:
Reflection/repetition listening
Timer: 2 minutes
Person 1: Speaks whatever they want
Person 2: Only listens
Timer: 1 minute
Person 2: Repeats back everything they can remember as verbatim as possible
Timer: 1 minutes
Person 1: Expands on, or corrects, what they heard repeated back to them.
Goal: Person 1 feels heard and understood. This is for Person 1 and is not about Person 2.
Exercise 2:
Listen Up OG Style
Timer: 30 minutes
Agree ahead of time whether you will do any reflection or discussion at the end.
Person 1: Only speaks, or rather, has the floor to speak as much or as little as they like with pausing or anything else
Person 2: Only listens attentively
At the end of the timer, Person 2 thanks them.
Optional: discuss what Person 2 heard (similar to Exercise 1 above) or Person 2 may say what they learned or heard about Person 1, which is always compassionate and empathetic at the end of a purely listening round.
Personal story: I sometimes hear myself say I want reflection when I don’t really, but I’m scared of rejecting the idea when asked and resort to fawning. I could use practice in saying “no” or do a better job setting up the container in the beginning around how I’m feeling that day. Alternatively, the listener could do a better job of noticing whether they want to give reflection because something is bothering them (in order to relieve their discomfort) or if it is truly an offer toward me, for me.
Exercise 3:
Listen Up 2
Come up with a shared prompt you want to explore together, or find one online.
(I’m going to hunt through my archives to see if I can find the actual prompts we used. If I can find them I’ll put them in the paid subscriber channel)
Timer: 15 minutes
Write freeform, without editing, around the prompt.
Read out loud to each other what you wrote while other person simply listens.
Thank the person who read.
Switch roles, reading out loud and listening and then thanking.
Episode 6: Listening and Solving All Your Friends' Problems