Ep121: The Journey from Egoistic to Authentic Listening

Ever catch yourself just waiting for your turn to talk, rather than truly engaging with the conversation at hand? You're not alone. Today, we're taking a deep dive into the art and science of genuine listening, confronting common pitfalls like disregarding unfamiliar information or pretending to listen while our thoughts are miles away. We'll explore how truly engaging with the thoughts and ideas of others can not only enrich our understanding but also help us avoid the trap of egoistic listening. 

Listening is far more than a passive activity, it's key to building our self-esteem, fostering healthy relationships, and even feeling loved and accepted. Join us as we explore the impact of poor listening habits and how they can cost us valuable insights and even damage our relationships. Reflect back on how your own listening patterns over the past week might have shaped your experiences. This is your invitation to clear out the mental clutter, tune in and learn how to revolutionize your interactions by becoming a more present and authentic listener.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Truth and Transcendence, brought to you by being Space with Katherine Llewellyn. Truth and Transcendence, episode 121. Today I'm going to talk about listening and before you switch off and think, oh god, not another conversation about listening, I really do think it's quite interesting to review and dig back into this topic, and this is going to be a very short episode so you won't have to listen for very long. So everyone talks about listening, everyone says we've got two ears and one mouth so we should just listen twice as much as we speak, and there are all sorts of platitudes and memes and obvious things that people say about listening. But I've been really thinking about this recently and noticing all of the subtle ways in which we sometimes don't really listen. And what's my definition of listen? My definition of listen is when we act like a completely open receiving device, when we just completely allow the information that is being offered to us to go into us and be received exactly as it is, without interpretation, without doing anything to it or with it, just receiving it exactly as it is. And again, you might think this is very obvious and that we all do this all the time, but actually we don't. So here are a few things that other people have shared with me and that I've noticed about how we don't actually listen. So one example is if I'm listening to somebody and I don't immediately understand what they're saying, so what they're talking about is something that is outside my sphere of knowledge or outside my sphere of personal experience, I might then stop listening. I might then decide that I can't understand it and therefore I'm not going to listen. Another example is when we are supposedly listening to somebody, but we're just waiting for the moment when it's our turn to speak, because we know there's something we want to say. So what we're listening for is when they stop talking, so that we can speak. Equally. If we're with somebody and rather than listening to them, we're trying to work out what we're going to say when it's our turn. Or we are listening out for the moment where they say something that we think is interesting. So we've already decided what we're interested in and we're not actually interested in hearing what they've got to say. We're only interested in when they come onto our particular pet topic of the moment. Or another way of not listening is to be distracted by other things.

Speaker 1: 3:18

I had a client once who, when we started working together, when I went and ended up a meeting with him which he was paying for. He would be sitting there checking his emails on his computer, and the way his office was set up was that his computer was arranged so that he had his back to me while he was doing this as well. And I said to him you know, do you realise this might not have a great impact on other people? He said, well, no, it's alright, it's fine, I can multitask. I said I'm no doubt you can multitask, but do you realise you've got your back to me and that I could possibly get the impression that you're not interested in what I have to say? This hadn't occurred to him. So he redesigned his office, turned his computer so that he was facing people and then if he was in a conversation with somebody, he wasn't checking his emails, but if he did have to consult the computer as part of the conversation, he could do that while still being face on with his person. And it made a very big difference. Everybody found him a much more approachable leader after that. He'd always been approachable, he'd always been an absolutely delightful human being, but just that small piece of signalling made people think he wasn't really listening.

Speaker 1: 4:35

Another thing that can occur is if somebody this whole question of whether we feel like we are being listened to is a very interesting one. So sometimes, if we're communicating something to somebody, what is it that allows us to think that they are listening to us? How do we know they are listening to us? And I don't know if you ever come across these courses where you learn how to look like you're listening. You learn how to sort of nod at the right moment or say, hmm, yes, fascinating, see what you mean To seem as if you're listening when you're not really. There's a whole kind of misunderstanding, which is that people don't want you to prove to them that you're listening. What they want is they want to feel like you're listening to them.

Speaker 1: 5:34

There's a kind of very interesting nuanced experience that occurs when somebody is really really hearing us and really listening to us. There's a different feeling, and very often it's because there's some form of acknowledgement taking place, whether that acknowledgement is saying something or making a sound or a gesture or a facial expression. But it's got to be genuine, otherwise it doesn't actually work. If it's not genuine, then it feels manipulative. And guess what? It is manipulative at that point.

Speaker 1: 6:07

So all of these things that we do instead of listening. Why do we do that? Is it because we genuinely don't think anyone else has anything interesting to say? Well, some of us do actually think that some of the time, which is a bit of a shame, but very often that's not the reason. Very often it's because we are ourselves under pressure. We feel clogged up with already too much data. It's almost like we've got constipation of the brain. Sounds disgusting, as I say it. I wasn't planning to say that, but it's almost like we've got too much data in the brain. And bringing in more data especially if it's a new idea that we don't understand or that might challenge some of our assumptions or some of our beliefs or perceptions and might take up an awful lot of processing space in the brain, is something that, perhaps on an unconscious level, we just don't want to do. We just do not want it Now.

Speaker 1: 7:04

If that's the case, then what I would suggest need to do is to clear out some of the dross. How do you clear out the dross to make it easier for you to listen properly? One way to do that is to notice if there are things within you that want to be said and heard. So sometimes we have to do some clearing out by having some conversations with people, and sometimes those are quite uncomfortable conversations Because if they were comfortable we probably would have done them already. So sometimes we can't listen properly to other people because we have things that we need to have heard.

Speaker 1: 7:44

I went to a wonderful event once. It was a gathering, there must have been 150 of us in the room and we each went up onto the stage, one by one, and shared something that we would like to have heard about us, something about us that we felt was real to us, truthful to us, important to us, and that we felt had not as of yet been heard. And we wanted to have it heard. And I remember standing on the stage and saying my thing that I wanted to say, and seeing all these people looking at me and of course, some of them would have been distracted or waiting for their turn or whatever but there was a very strong feeling that a large number of people were actually hearing me and the sense of nourishment and understanding and acceptance and love actually, that I experienced was phenomenal. I've never forgotten that experience.

Speaker 1: 8:41

It was decades ago and I think at that point I made a very strong decision, which was I was going to do my best to have people be heard in my space and I was going to indicate that I had heard them and that if I drifted off and wasn't really listening, I was going to own up to that and say I'm sorry, I drifted off, it wasn't your fault. Would you mind saying that again, I missed it and actually encourage people to do the same with me if they wanted to, because I realised how significant this is for us as a tribal creature. We need to be heard, actually heard, on all of the levels the feeling level, the hearing level, the seeing level, the energetic level, all those levels, not just the words. And again, this is not about intuiting what somebody really means by what they're saying. Some people develop a faculty where they can say to somebody oh, yes, yes, I can listen so well that I know what you really mean, which is not the same thing that what you actually said, but it's what you really mean. I know what you really mean.

Speaker 1: 9:49

And the person saying, well, actually, no, that's not what I really meant and get out of my head, you don't know what I really mean. All that you know is what I said and the experience that you have when you're listening to me. So if you do hear it and respond to that, then we've got a chance for a real, authentic conversation. But if you're pretending to hear it, if you are trying to be over clever and second guess me and assume you know what I mean when I'm actually saying something else, or if you're discounting what I'm saying because you don't understand it and therefore you are saying, therefore it's meaningless or therefore it's not relevant, or therefore it's not clever enough, etc.

Speaker 1: 10:25

In fact, that last one is a particular danger for very, very, very bright people, because very bright people are used to being the smartest person in the room and they're used to understanding everything that's going on.

Speaker 1: 10:41

So for them there's a real danger, if they don't understand, of shutting down and cutting it out.

Speaker 1: 10:44

So if you're not understanding what I'm saying, then you're not going to understand what I'm saying, or shutting down and cutting it out, because it takes them way outside of what they're comfortable with and what they're familiar with and where they feel capable, and they're used to feeling capable and they don't like it when they don't feel that way. So listening is always really well worth considering again and really noticing if you think back over your last week, to what extent were you really listening and to what extent did you feel heard and how does that affect your relationships? And how does it affect your sense of self, your self worth, your sense of feeling loved and accepted and understood, and the people around you? To what extent do they feel loved, accepted, understood and what extent do they feel either manipulated, handled, discounted or minimized in any way? So thank you very much for listening. I hope you have a wonderful week and I'll see you next time. Have a wonderful week and I'll see you next time.