Magic Happens When You Listen

As a therapist, I’ve learned that the quality of my therapy is simply the quality of my listening. When I listen poorly, not much happens. When I listen better, magic starts to unfold.

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If you want to improve the quality of your relationships and make them more magical, nothing beats listening.

When you listen deeply to someone speaking, you become entranced by the musicality and the rhythms. You pick up subtle deeper meanings that lie below the words.

You create a space of potentiality for magic to enter. When it happens, it surprises both of you.

Listening is the most applied and useful form of meditation that exists.

It is mindfulness in action.

In order to listen well, you have to start noticing whenever you exit the conversational highway to visit Thinkville, population one.

When you do lose the track, it is helpful to gently guide yourself back into the flow by really listening to the next sentence.

Often there is enough context to pick things back up again, without needing to interrupt the flow.

As you do this more and more, your awareness vehicle spends more and more time on the track.

Even better, it starts to guide itself gravitationally back, like the lane assist on a Tesla.

You build the habit of coming back into awareness.

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The gold standard of listening is full-body listening.

Full-body listening is tuning into your entire nervous system as it picks up information from the speaker.

Your body will give you information on micro-shifts in body language, tone, and physiology that are too subtle for you to pick up consciously. One of the main things you will pick up on is how relaxed or tense the speaker is. This gives you valuable information on how available they may be for what you might convey.

When you listen in this way it feels as if you have become a broad satellite dish picking up all forms of life in front of you. It is as if there are eyes and ears all over your body.

Demonstrating that you are really listening will impress your speaker more than anything else you might say.

It is luxurious and incredibly rare.

Best of all, you are literally meditating, and so you get all the side benefits of deepening your own practice.

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Lastly, in a world of artificial intelligence, full-body listening will be the most human thing we can do.

Listening cultivates soulfulness, which is exactly what we’ll crave in an artificial utopia.

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P.S., here’s an AI version of me. Sure he’s fun, but is he soulful?