When I took a 6-month Leadership training program in 2006, I was taught to "listen". I discovered that there are many ways that one can actively listen. When you cause yourself to be conscious of listening in a certain context, you hear things that you may not otherwise hear. For example, listening for the Gold, listening from compassion, listening from understanding, and my personal favorite, Listening from Learning. I like this one the most because I do it as a default, it comes naturally to me.
I believe that everyone we talk to is a potential teacher and so I enjoy listening for the wisdom in each person I communicate with. For example, I recently started taking an acting class. My acting teacher, Stan, is a very wise man. In the very first class, he taught us different exercises both vocal and physical. He imparts that there are 4 basic emotions, anger, sadness, happiness and fear. However, the one thing I found most valuable was learning about reacting. If you are rehearsing lines with somebody, you are reacting to your partner. Our homework, was to observe our reactions in interactions with people in our lives. More specifically, we are to wait a small period longer than we normally would before speaking. The general principle is to have us be in touch with our initial emotion and then deciding how to respond. What I love about this method of self-observation, is that it builds self-awareness. Rather than operating in the thick of our raw emotional reactions, we can actually distinguish the feeling that comes up and then allowing the authentic self to choose the response. Wouldn't it be great if we do this consistently in our day-to-day lives, to pause before reacting. The world could do with a lot more of this type of self-awareness.
