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Page 1 of 2 Mid-week Inspiration, Listen? I heard what you said. So often that is as deep as listening goes. Many of us, myself included, are so busy listening to our own inner voices that we only pick up the surface details of a conversation. Often on a subconscious level it is not so important what we are being told as it is how we portray ourselves from our answers.
The other day I heard someone spin a lie so quickly I wouldn’t for a moment have doubted it if I hadn’t been sitting in their company. The lie was told not to cause harm; rather it was told to deliver an intention in a way that the listener would hear the underlying intention behind the words. Much of society believes this is the only effective way to communicate.
The problem with this convoluted communication is simply that thoughts and words are creative. As is often said in motivational talks “what you think about comes about”, when we add the focus of our spoken word to our thoughts we empower the beliefs driving those thoughts. We start creating patterns in our lives, patterns as varied as our backgrounds yet always according to our intuitive sensibilities; a negative thought or word will create a negative tendency. Even a little white lie carries a basic thought that others don’t care enough to listen to our needs; it carries an overall negative or destructive tendency. This holds true of course for positive thoughts and words as well, the real challenge for most of us is that we don’t actually pay attention to what we are thinking and feeling so unknowingly we create repeating patterns in our lives.
Why does that keep happening to me? Why is s/he so lucky?, because of a tendency of thinking.
Some people, managers, executives, counselors, sales people and many others are trained to hear the subtle nuances behind the words people speak. Happy, sad, angry; it is all audible to the person who is consciously listening, paying attention. We watch the body language, the colour and design of the clothing people wear, we notice make-up, we pay attention to timeliness. All of this most of us do to some degree unconsciously. This is much of where those first impressions come from. We look around a public place and ‘feel’ to avoid certain people and drawn to others. The professional listener realizes it is usually about the other person and no longer takes personally other peoples emotional packages. Yet even this listening that only a few are trained to do is of little value in bringing peace to our world, harmony to our communities and joy into our relationships.
What we need to do is learn to listen in a new way. We need to learn to listen to the hidden intentions back of the words. In “A Course In Miracles” it states that every communication is a call for love or a gift of love. In “NVC”(a communication technique developed by Dr Marshall Rosenburg) they say that all communication is either ‘please’ or ‘thank you’. There are many ways of saying the same thing. What is important is the practice of listening in this new way; what I call listening to the hidden intentions.
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