Listen Like It Matters (Because It Does)

(air swooshing) (mouse clicking) ♪ Headspace Studio ♪ Hi, everyone. I'm Matt Abrahams, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Headspace. This week is all about mindful communication. One of the most transformative shifts we can make is focusing less on what we say and more on how we listen to what others say. Today, we'll explore why listening is often harder than it seems, how it impacts our relationships, and how mindful presence can help us truly hear others, connect to others and build lasting relationships. Many of us don't listen as well as we could. There are many barriers to listening. They all happen to start with the letter P. There's physical noise. Sometimes it's hard to listen just because the environment we're in is loud. Another barrier to listening is physiological, what's going on in our bodies. If you're tired, if you're hungry, if you're hangry, if you're nervous, it's really hard to demonstrate the focusing required for listening. And finally, there's psychological challenges and barriers that get in the way of listening. A lot of us are rehearsing what we wanna say next. We're judging, we're evaluating. We're connecting ideas. Listening is definitely a skill that we can all develop. Believe me, my wife encourages me all the time to keep developing my listening skills. We learn listening by observing others and see what works. And we also learn listening by seeing how people respond to us. It's not innate. We can all learn to listen better. To be a better listener, there's several things you can do. I like to teach my students how to ace their listening: pace, space, and grace. To begin, we have to give ourselves space, and I mean space in two ways. One, we have to physically be in a place where we can actually hear. Maybe that means moving to a quieter room, stepping outside, but more importantly, we need to give ourselves mental space. There's a lot going on in our heads whenever we interact. We need to open up a space to actually be present and listen. Beyond space, we have to slow the pace down. Life comes at us very quickly. Interactions are fast. You need to slow down and focus to allow you to truly listen. And then finally, you have to give yourself some grace. And grace is all about giving yourself permission, not just to listen, but to listen beyond the words. When people say things, I'll share a story where I messed that up. I came out of a meeting with a colleague and he turned to me and he said, "How do you think that went?" And our experience in the meeting did not go well. It was very poor. And I immediately jumped into giving feedback. I thought that's what he was looking for. In fact, had I noticed, he came out the back door, not the front door as I did. He was looking down. He was speaking...