Listening is a deep skill – and more!
With the very welcome recent news about vaccines and what that might mean for us quite soon, maybe now we can all start to breathe a little more easily. Can I invite you to think about breathing?
Does that make you notice your breathing? Take a lovely deep breath…
If we stop breathing, everything stops. Breathing is vital to life, obviously. Stopping our breathing is simply not an option. It’s instinctive and fundamental; we don’t give it much thought. Quite right too – life is complex enough. So this is an invitation to think about why breathing is like listening.
More and more when I’m setting up thinking sessions, or teaching the component of Attention, I compare listening with breathing. I suggest we consider how breathing is both an aspect of our physiology that we naturally ignore, and a real physical skill that we can choose to develop.
If you were an elite athlete, or a singer, or a yoga practitioner, you would notice and develop your breathing very deliberately. You would know when to tap into your breathing to increase and sustain your stamina and depth. It would become a very conscious everyday part of your skill development.
Likewise listening is a deep skill as well as something we barely notice; born with it (unless sadly absent) it’s physiological and something we can choose to ignore or develop. Is it an elite skill? Maybe, though it probably shouldn’t be. When people ask me what I do, I say quite simply ‘I show people how to listen’. Because thinking and listening are inextricably linked, and it all starts with listening. Great, generative listening.
Listening to inspire and spark new thinking. Listening in a way that shuts down our instinct to reply, advise, correct, direct, deliver. Being listened to in this way is so rare we have to contract for it, and so vital it should be on every school curriculum.
In its way, listening like this is disruptive – how about that?! – because it disrupts the norm.
As we end the year and hope for so much better in 2021, how might you plan to deepen your listening? Who might you listen to so that they can think better, and you might know them better?
And if you would like to introduce someone to the disruptive inspiration that is deepening listening, maybe you’d like to invite them to Press Pause with me sometime in 2021? If you press the link you will find a list of dates in 2021, when a tiny group (5 + me) can experience the joys of listening to ignite our thinking in two online hours of precious time to pause. And breathe.
Please do consider joining me. I would love to see you there.
