Here's a more complex exercise for you. There's something I did talk about in my TED talk on conscious listening, didn't have long to go through it. I'd like to go into it in more detail with you now. I called it listening positions, then these days, I call it listening from listening from, it is still about listening positions. Imagine there's a house on a hill, and you're standing looking at it, if you don't like the way it looks. You're free to walk around the hill and see if it looks better from the other side.

I remember reading Stranger in a Strange Land, I think, by Robert Heinlein many years ago, where there was a truth saiyr of some kind in that book, who have you said to him, what color's that house? The person would say it's green on this side. So that's an assumption that it's green on the other side, you can always go around Have a look, it may not be your listening position is a little bit like that. So now go back to imagine the house on the hill and imagine you're at the bottom of the hill in a concrete bunker, looking at it through a little slit on the front. That's pretty much how most people, listen. There's an entrenched listening position that's been developed over the years as those listening filters that we talked about, have developed, you're not in control of many of them, your language, the culture, you're born into your locality, the people you associate with, you have some control over the values, attitudes, beliefs that you accrete along the way although many of those simply get absorbed.

And of course, you are more in control of your intentions and expectations. The more you become conscious of those filters, the more you can change your listening position. But it's not just about the filters. It's also about very much about your intention and how you behave. Let's have a look at a few listing position indices. I suppose I give them to you as scales.

They're not necessarily all scales. These are I should emphasize are just examples. You can create as many listening positions as you wish there are probably hundreds or thousands, maybe countless different listening positions, places you can listen from. So here's the first couple. Active listening is very classically used in the healing professions in counseling, therapy, places like that. Also in education, it is incredibly useful to defuse upset if you're dealing with somebody who's unhappy.

So if you happen to be the parent of a teenager, for example, this can be very useful there as well. In parenting, this is always a quite a useful thing because of course, conflict is something that every family is very familiar with. And rather than disempowering somebody by invalidating what they're saying, what you do by active listening, is you leave them feeling heard. And that is In some cases may be a rare feeling. How do you do it? You simply say, Okay, what I heard you say is dot, dot, dot, and the.dot.is, where you repeat back exactly what they said, without coloration without just making assumptions about what they were really trying to say, you know, helping them along the way.

Those kind of things we tend to do to manipulate conversations in the way we want them to go. It's very important here to be utterly transparent, not to get involved, and simply to say what I heard you say is, that's it. This is tremendously useful in conflict. A friend of mine was telling me about an experience he had the other day where he cut somebody up in the car, and the traffic lights went red and he stopped and the guy was so angry behind him, he screeched to a halt, jumped out of his car and came and pounded on my friend's window. He was furious, potentially quite dangerous, actually, that situation. My friend wound down his window not all the way and said, What's the problem and the guy shouted at him and he started to do active listening.

Okay, I hear that you're very upset. I hear that. I did this I cut you up and I caused you to and it could have been an accident so forth. just repeating back what the guy said. And every time he repeated something, the anger diminished, until at the end, they apologize to each other calmly they shook hands and parted company with mutual understanding and tolerance. Now, that's the way in which active listening can be tremendously useful in defusing anger, because people who are angry, love to be heard, and to have their views respected, it does tend to take the steam out of any situation.

That's why it's very useful in places like customer service. When you have somebody phoning up in a tizzy about a big complaint is very useful to repeat back to them. what they've said, and so the anger diffuses. Now passive listening, by contrast might be like a Zen master, sitting by a stream, simply listening to the sound very similar to savoring, I suppose, in that there's no meaning making going on. There's no interpretation. It is simply selecting a sound to listen to and paying passive attention to it.

Let's have a look at another scale. Another couple of listening positions, places to listen from. Critical listening is what you've been doing to me all the way through this course really, so far, and I'm sure what you'll do to me through the rest of it. Oh, I didn't know that. Where did you get that from? I'm not sure I agree with that.

That little voice in your head, the little voice that just said, What little voice in my head? Is he talking about? That little voice? The one that's always going to agree with this? Is it true? Is it useful?

It's a very strong place to listen from and we do that a lot of the time, particularly in business, it's a good place to listen from. But it's not the only place to listen from and you don't want to get stuck there as a default, it might not be the most appropriate place. For example, if somebody comes to you with a bereavement, and you do not really want to be marking them out of 10, and how well they're doing this request for time off, critical listening is to be used with care. And I do advise perhaps, that you don't take it home with you too much. Because assessing what's valuable and what's not, doesn't necessarily jive with the generosity and giving that's necessary for family relationships. So it's fine as long as you're conscious that you're in critical listening, and you're making sure that's the best place to be for the conversation you're having.

Sometimes, you won't might want to move into empathic or empathetic listening, which is going on to the other person's Island, feeling their feelings, leaving them Feeling not just heard, but understood, and valued. Those are the three things that we really want in relationship, aren't they to be heard, understood, and valued. And empathic, listening pretty much does all three of those in one fell swoop. So it's very strong indeed, it really gives a connection between two people. And it's a strong way of building intimacy with somebody in a relationship. Talking about relationships.

I'll give you a couple more listening positions here. Now, hands up, these are gender stereotypes, okay, so I don't want to get into big trouble. I'm not saying this is true of all men or all women. It's not absolutely a generalization that applies everywhere. But there's enough truth in it. I think that it's at least amusing and at best, very useful for enhancing relationships.

So here we go. Men, not all men. Not all the time. tend to listen in a way that I call reductive, which is for a point, for a destination for a solution to solve a problem to get somewhere, there's got to be a reason for going. Now you can see these two guys are talking together. He's saying I've got this problem.

He's saying, oh, here's the solution. Ah, thanks. And that's a male compensation that's fairly straightforward and pretty robust. And that's how males tend to go about things. Not all men, not all the time. Now, females, on the other hand, tend not all females, not all the time tend to communicate, and listen in a way I call expansive, which is to say, there is no point to get to there's no solution to arrive at, there's no problem to solve necessarily.

It's much more about being with the other person, on a journey, wherever it's going. And just enjoying the journey. being there with them. Heart to heart. Again, it's fairly typical to see See those two men sort of looking somewhere else other than at each other men scanning the horizon for danger and food, isn't it? I think, on the other hand, females tend to be much more into icontact and heart to heart, perhaps because of mothering and looking into the eyes of a baby, and so forth.

Now, these are stereotypes, of course. Nevertheless, expansive listening is a very beautiful and powerful thing. And if those two listening positions get entrenched, I think this is at the root of many people's he or she never listens to me. They mean he never listens, or she never listens in the way I do. And remember, everybody listens individually. So you might get a conversation where he comes, she comes home and says, I've had a dreadful day this happened, this happened.

This happened. He looks up from the football game, and says, darling, that's awful. Why don't you have a bar that always makes you feel better? Now in the male world, that's problem solved back to the football and the female world that wasn't quite what she was looking for. She was hoping much more to have something like Oh, you poor thing, sit down, have a glass of wine, tell me all about it. That's a very unreal thing to do tell me all about it.

However, if we can recognize that we're perhaps stuck in one of these positions, then it is possible to build much deeper relationships, and to listen in a more productive way. One final one, which is a bit obvious, I suppose. But nevertheless, it's important to recognize the difference between focused listening and distracted listening. We have so much coming in now, in terms of social media, which I've talked about the fear of missing out and the constant bombardment of things. I hope you don't have your email set to ping you every time you get it inbound, because that is fatal. For focus and for concentration.

Much better to check every two hours or twice a day or whatever. It might be diarize it check your email at regular times, but do not let it drive you. Because the distraction of the shiny toy of technology and the FOMO the fear of missing out, somebody might be tweeting about me. That takes us away very much from listening. And we do an awful lot of listening. Now while we're doing something else, namely looking at a screen, try if you're going to listen to somebody to make sure it's focused, listening, recognize if you're in distracted listening, that's okay.

Sometimes you have to be recognized that you're there. So you're listening from exercise or exercises, review your filters. Think about those filters that we've talked about, and how they affect your listening. What's your natural listening position? Where's that bunker that you've built over the years? How do you tend to listen to people?

When might this not be the best way to listen to people? And are there some new positions maybe some of the ones I've suggested or not? Other ones that you could think of, which might be useful in your life. Listening from can actually change your reality and fundamentally alter the way you relate to other people. I hope you enjoy it.