Category Archive:Listening

Mastering the Balance

Barbara post on May 15th, 2013
Posted in Communication, Family, Fear, Listening, Love, Meditation, Perception, Spirituality

Mastering the balance between accepting life as it is and realizing that our thoughts create our reality is a life-long endeavor. Many modern-day gurus and life coaches of all stripes are quick to tell us that everything we experience we create. I’m not disputing that the essence of what they say is true, but I believe life is more complex than that. To expect to have the power to manifest everything that happens in the web of life that becomes real around us will make us either arrogant or drench us in self-loathing and guilt, or both.

Some events just are. People we love get sick or die. They lose businesses or jobs because of the economy - not their performance. They get into awful situations because of choices they make. Or they get in awful situations for being at the wrong place at the wrong time (think tragedies great and small that victimize so many). And then there are the times Mother Nature wallops some people and whole communities with her awesome power. The best we can do in such situations is find whatever strength they bring out in us—or those around us—as we seek the grace, lessons, and sometimes even blessings in them.

Growing Out of the Brokenness

What we can manifest is our own best selves. So many things in our lives aren’t much more than potential; a whole host of possibilities. And how we think about them materializes one possibility out of all that potential that exists. At such times, how we think is EVERYTHING. If we expect goodness, awesomeness, love, success, and beauty, and focus our thoughts on those possibilities then that is what we’ll manifest. If we expect more pain, failure, disappointment, loss, and rejection, and our thoughts dance with a host of What-ifs fueled by fear, then we will manifest exactly what we focus our thoughts upon.

The more our thoughts develop from our love, the more likely we create the outcome we desire. This is true whether we’re in control of the circumstances or not. How we think our thoughts is a habit. And it is also a choice day-by-day, moment-by-moment.

Loving thoughts leave little room for fear-filled thoughts. So today, as much as possible, focus your thoughts on love. Change what you can and look for the love in what you can’t.

 

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Shame: Swampland of the Soul

Barbara post on May 1st, 2013
Posted in Communication, Family, Fear, Listening, Perception

Brene Brown is my she-ro; she has ventured deeply into the “swampland of the soul,” looked at shame straight in the eye and dared to tell us what she saw. Brown is part of a long line of women who have taught and inspired me with her knowledge and her courage. She wakes us out of our chosen slumber. And if we listen to her wisdom, it will make all of us better women and men, better human beings. She defines concepts so clearly that we can take up the challenge of addressing them in ourselves and in doing so, make the kinds of connections (to people and ideas) that make life work.

Her TED talk on vulnerability in 2010 became an internet sensation with over 9 million views on TED and another 900,000+ on YouTube. She returned to TED, a place she calls a convention of failures (but in a good way! – think about it, she’s absolutely right) in 2012 to talk about another taboo subject. In this talk Brene helps us understand shame’s essence and how it differs from guilt. She tells us how it feels the same for men and women but comes from different sources (an excellent insight for every woman who ever said she wanted her husband to be vulnerable, to not hide his emotions). She tells us that shame needs three things to exist: secrecy, silence, and judgment. And finally, she tells us that empathy is the antidote to shame.

If you’ve ever felt that you weren’t good enough or if you’ve ever heard that small voice in your head say, “who do you think you are,” if you’ve felt overwhelmed or ever feared looking weak, sit back for 20 minutes and learn a bit about “daring greatly” (the title of her most recent book).

When we spend our lives waiting until we’re perfect or bulletproof before we walk into the arena, we ultimately sacrifice relationships and opportunities that may not be recoverable, we squander our precious time, and we turn our backs on our gifts, those unique contributions that only we can make. Perfect and bulletproof are seductive, but they don’t exist in the human experience. Brene Brown

 

 

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The Secret to Happiness

Barbara post on February 27th, 2013
Posted in Communication, Family, Forgiveness, Listening, Perception

I have long been of the opinion that the secret to happiness is managing expectations. I once read that expectations are simply anticipated disappointments. So if you want to be happy, don’t expect any one or anything to make it so. I’m not saying don’t dream but in the dreaming recognize that the only thing you can control is you. Any other control is an illusion. Circumstances (like hurricanes) happen and we can never control another person but we can always control how we perceive.

photo of a baby smiling

Natural Happiness

Expectations, when you think about it, are merely thoughts. These thoughts create the lens with which we perceive the world and how we perceive creates our reality. Switch the lens, reality changes. Change the thought, change the expectation, change reality.

This became concrete for me in my early twenties. I had spent my childhood moving from place to place, going to multiple schools in myriad states from the east coast to the west and from New England to the deep south. My dad, one of the original corporate turn-around specialists, always had new challenges to conquer. As a natural introvert, all the moving was very difficult for me and I saw it as a burden. I wanted stability. Security. A place to call home.

I eventually met a man whose family had lived in the same town for generations. This was the guy for me! Mere months before our wedding, he was accepted into the Navy’s flight school. My expectation of stability evaporated but at least in my state of newly-wedded bliss my disappointment was short-lived. It wasn’t long before I realized that the resilience and adaptability needed for military life were the very things I had learned in childhood. What I once viewed as a burden had become a strength.

I also had stumbled upon the power of changing my thoughts. With my change in perception came many other benefits, like:

  • forgiveness for the losses I’d held and stored as treasures
  • a recognition that adaptability was a skill learned only in the cauldron of change
  • a realization that place doesn’t confer stability but love does
  • the understanding that home is a state of mind not a physical location
  • the knowledge that I could recreate myself and start fresh by letting go of mistakes without anyone else around to remind me of them

What I learned is that circumstances could not define me but my choices would. I had experienced the reality of the power of my thoughts to create my life (and life continues to teach me that valuable lesson). I had found the secret to happiness.

We have so much power within us to create our own happiness. It all depends on our thoughts, our expectations, and the lens we choose to look at the world.

See how TED presenter Sean Achor learned this valuable lesson at the tender age of seven: his story involves a little sister, a fall from great heights, quick thinking, and unicorns.

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Values. Relationship. Conflict.

Barbara post on February 6th, 2013
Posted in Communication, Family, Listening, Love, Perception

Values. . . we often assume we know what we mean when we bandy about terms like American values, Christian values, Progressive values, and family values. Yet the words we use to describe our values can have different meanings for different people, even the people closest to us. When values collide, conflict arises.

Since February is the month for love, it’s also a good time to reflect on how values affect the relationships closest to us as well as those in the wider community of world and work.sand heart

The relationships that tend to have the least amount of conflict are the ones in which people share not just affinity – in community/work relationships – or love – in close relationships - but similar values too.

The sign of an emotionally mature relationship is when those involved remain unthreatened and maintain love or respect even when values differ.

The thing is, we tend to assume we share values with people we like so we can feel betrayed when we find out the truth.

One stumbling block to longevity in relationships is that attraction between two people is often so powerful that discussions revealing core values can be side-stepped (or clouded in fantasy) because feelings are so strong.

While attraction is a great beginning, lasting relationships develop from the give and take necessary to keep love or respect alive in the real world.

The art of compromise

The trick to this art is compromising only that which is non-essential to the core of your being, the essence of who you are. It may be that you haven’t recently reflected deeply on what is most important to you, what is absolutely non-negotiable and what you can compromise or let go of for the sake of the relationship.

In any relationship—whether in marriage, friendship, family, community, or work—clarity about shared verses individual values reduces conflict. When you know which values you share versus the ones you individually own, you can choose to agree to disagree, or challenge, probe, or embrace eachother’s values.

Name it; own it

This short exercise will help you name what you value. Naming things makes them real and allows us to deal with them. The exercise includes a list of values, but not a comprehensive one. Feel free to add some of your own. It’s a great discussion starter. I suggest sharing it with your beloved and then discussing your similarities and differences.

Keep in mind as you complete the exercise (less than 10 minutes) that many items in the center circle—non-negotiable values— can represent a bit of inflexibility that could result in numerous conflicts. Conversely, if there are too few items in the center circle you could fall prey to the adage those who stand for nothing will fall for anything.

And when you’re deciding what is negotiable or not, remember to think of how each value plays out in the real world rather than what sounds good. For example, if both freedom and safety are values you hold dear when and how will you allow safety to trump freedom? If honesty is a non-negotiable value does that mean you say everything you believe without regard to other’s feelings?

These questions and more are likely to come up in discussions so don’t just share this with your beloved.  Share it also with friends, family members, and even coworkers.

You’ll be surprised by how much you thought was true about someone is not true at all. Treasure the journey of discovery.

Values Clarification exercise

 

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Listening to Ourselves = Awakening

Barbara post on January 26th, 2013
Posted in Communication, Family, Fear, Listening, Meditation Tags: , , , , , , ,

Listening to ourselves, to our own inner stirrings, is an act of awakening that leads us on a journey to wholeness. This listening is not simply thinking through an issue or problem and making a decision. This kind of listening is an act of consciousness that calls us to our deepest knowings—to the key bits of ourselves that we’ve let go of as we responded to the life that happened.

Conscious listening is work. But the rewards are worth the trouble. In the same way that consciously listening to others is an act of love that builds relationships and empowers both speaker and listener through understanding, listening to ourselves is an act of love that calls us to recognize the truth of who we are.

Listening to our own inner stirrings, our internal stories of love and loss, hope and pain, and triumph and fear is an integral part of awakening to the essence of who we are. It is an act of self-love that empowers us through deeper self-understanding and gives us the courage to become our true selves.

Awake by Mark Groves www.markgroves.us

Awake by Mark Groves www.markgroves.us

Awakening is necessary because we start closing off parts of our essential selves early in life. Circumstances and experiences teach us to hide certain aspects of our true selves that don’t meet the approval of important people—parents, teachers, siblings, friends.

In a bid for acceptance, and to keep us safe from separation, we jettison these unacceptable parts and bit by bit we forget they exist.

The great grace of growing up is that we mine the wisdom of our experiences to begin to listen again to the essence of who we are. Hard lessons of failure, loss, rejection, and fear become teachers that encourage us to remember (re+member) and restore what we once intrinsically knew.

Mindfully listening to the stories we tell ourselves allows our Spirits and bodies to awaken our conscious minds to the truths of our essential self that never really left us when we jettisoned the unacceptable bits. They simply burrowed deep into our subconscious.

In truthfully and consciously listening to what we tell ourselves, we can release the negative stories that limit us and embrace the awesomeness of our true re-membered essential being.

Writer Karen Thompson Walker has some wonderful observations of what we can learn from the stories we tell ourselves, especially the stories of our fears. Her insights are well worth the next ten minutes.

What Fear Can Teach Us

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Listening with Discernment not Judgment

Barbara post on January 16th, 2013
Posted in Communication, Family, Listening, Peace, Spirituality Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Photo courtesy of Mark Groves. www.MarkGroves.us

Photo courtesy of Mark Groves. www.MarkGroves.us

Listening with discernment rather than judgment is one of the greatest gifts we can give to each other.

The difference between discernment and judgment is subtle but important. When listening with discernment, we recognize and understand the differences between what the speaker is saying and what we hold to be true. We respect their right to have their view; we are not threatened by the differences. We don’t believe that the speaker is ignorant, unreasonable, or too foolish for words.

Listening with discernment

Listening with discernment requires:

  • an open heart
  • respect for the other (no matter what their age)
  • the realization that speaker’s truth is just that – one person’s truth not the ultimate truth

Listening with discernment opens the conversation up for a lively exchange of ideas and the potential for learning something new and having our own ideas challenged.

Listening with judgment

When we listen with judgment, our own opinion is so pronounced that we often can’t recognize any truth in the speaker’s words. In fact, we’re really not listening at all because as the other person speaks, we’re forming our counter argument and lining up the ramparts of our defense.

We assume that the other person is too young, too immature, too uninformed, too conservative, too liberal, too religious, too . . .too. . .too. . . And we’re waiting for them to finish so we can enlighten them.

Listening with judgment shuts the conversation down before there is any hope of creating real understanding.

Why We Listen With Judgment

The simple answer is that we’re biased. Bias is actually essentially good. It helps us categorize all sorts of things in our information-drenched world. Without some sort of bias, we’d have no mental shortcuts to help us make sense of our environment.

Our bias comes from our unique experiences that develop from our basic orientation to the world, our cultural and familial influences, our location – where we’re born/where we live(d), our interests, knowledge, habits, beliefs, and more. With all these things, we create a personal truth about how the world operates and our place in it. And since our experiences are unique, our truth is also unique.

Unfortunately in today’s internet-ruled media world, we easily find others who support our biases and reinforce the notion that our truth is THE truth. They normalize judgmental listening and the effects of that can be seen in the extreme dysfunction in politics. But the more unfortunate effects of occur in our families.

The Grace in Being Wrong

In our families we can believe that our shared experiences means that we end up with a shared truth. Disagreements can build a nearly impenetrable wall of judgment. We lose sight of the uniqueness of the other, assuming we know WHY they do what they do or say what they say.

Yet without discerning listening, we can’t know because we’re not listening with our hearts. We hear the words they speak but we don’t hear their truth because we’re too busy listening to our own.

When we can admit the possibility of being wrong, and even more striking that they may be right, we begin to listen with discernment. This simple loving act opens the door to understanding. Understanding paves the way to acceptance. Acceptance builds the bridges that create peace.

Peace in families will create peace in the world.

This Ted video by Kathryn Shultz: On Being Wrong is worth a look.

 

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Conscious Listening: The Ultimate Act of Generosity & Caring

Barbara post on January 3rd, 2013
Posted in Communication, Family, Health, Listening Tags: , , , , , ,

Did you know that we spend 60% of our time listening?

Unfortunately, most of us really don’t listen very well at all and we retain only 25% of what we hear. This lack causes all sorts of problems in personal relationships, at work, and even accessing everyday services like proper health care.

Since January is a time for resolutions, I suggest that we all resolve to practice better listening because good listening could improve nearly every other aspect of our lives. Good listening—conscious listening— is a way to be truly present to another human being, it’s an act of that shows respect, caring, and love.

The problem with listening is that we have filters—mostly unconscious—that create barriers to hearing the real content of what is said.  These filters include beliefs, expectations, values, and intentions (among others) and cause us to hear not what is said but what we want or expect.

Adding to the filter problem is lack of attention to the task. A friend told me that when she’s talking on the phone to her very chatty cousin (who she says she adores), she’s surfing the web and reading articles. And we’ve all seen people supposedly having a “discussion” while texting or playing on their phones. Saddest of all is to see a child trying to compete for attention with a parent’s phone or tablet. These examples are not a matter of rudeness, but of caring.

Being Heard: Most of us have experienced how wonderful it feels to truly be heard, to be understood (and therefore validated), or simply to successfully complete a task because you have all the instructions. Our society, awash in electronic distraction, is becoming less skilled at listening—and since we were never that good at it to begin with, that’s a big problem.

Sound expert, author, and international speaker, Julian Treasure (great name!) has 5 Tips to develop better listening that he presented last year during a Ted talk in Scotland.

Conscious listening, he said, is an exercise in mindfulness that takes practice but since listening is the ultimate act of generosity and caring, the effort pays off handsomely. To develop better listening he suggests:

  1. Take 3 to 5 minutes every day for silence
  2. Practice hearing “channels of sound” in open spaces or in noisy environments so that you can begin to exercise control over your “soundscapes”
  3. Savor listening; learn to recognize and enjoy the mundane sounds in your environment
  4. Switch your “listening position” (active verses passive,  empathetic verses critical, etc.)
  5. Use the acronym RASA: receive, appreciate, summarize, ask

Developing conscious listening, listening with our heart and not just our ears, is a skill that not only will strengthen personal and working relationships, it’s essential for generating the kind of understanding necessary to create the peace we long for in our lives, in our communities, and in the world.

“Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.” ― Rumi

Julian Treasure’s Ted talk on Listening 

 

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