We have got challenges in our in our own listening. And if I broaden this to talk about things that we do ourselves, so not so much things that are external to us in society, the trends which are getting in the way, the habits that we have, as human beings which have been around forever, of course, which gets in the way, these are holes in the bucket of your communication, which you can do something about because they're internal to you. And there are four of them. I call them the four leeches because they suck power out of your communication. Here they are. Looking good being right people pleasing and fixing they all come from one emotional root.

Can you guess what that is? using the word the dark side for this will give you a hint because the root of the dark side is the same thing in Star Wars fear These four things all come from fear. Let's go into them in a bit of detail. So you can start to ask yourself, do these play out in my life? Now we all like to look good. It's natural to want people to approve of us.

And with all of these things, it's a question of degree. I'm not saying it's evil, wrong, bad or you should never want to look good, of course not. However, if it becomes a dominating motivation in your communication, that can become an issue, it tends to give rise to some behaviors, which are not particularly productive. For example, what I call competitive speaking, that is to say, if I'm saying, I'm going to Greece on holiday this year, the other person might say, Oh, yeah, I've been to Greece five or six times. And my little piece of joy killed. I feel belittled reduced, the other person is aggrandizing themselves.

Trumping everything that people say becomes a habit, you're having to be bigger better. I'm sure that nobody listening to this has ever claimed to have read a book they haven't read. We've all done that. Haven't we all seen a film we haven't seen? Oh, yeah. Solzhenitsyn.

He's very good, isn't he? We all do it a little bit. However, when it becomes necessary to Trump other people and we start to embroider, that's where the issue becomes much more relevant because people can spot it and you lose the power in your speaking. And there's another manifestation of looking good, which is very, very common. I call it speechwriting. Which is to say, while this inconvenient noise is going on in front of me, I'm composing my next bomber.

My next piece of brilliant dialogue. Speech writing, is photo listening, false listening, not real listening. You're actually concerned with what's going on here. What about I'm going to say next? It often gives rise to the response. Yeah, anyway, and then on to what I want to say, which crushes other people, makes them feel angry, actually, and Ill considered.

So speech writing is not something I recommend, actually trust your mouth to come up with the right thing when somebody finished speaking. And then a third manifestation of looking good is the simple phrase. I know. I met somebody at TED, who was talking about having moved to Paris and was saying, Ah, not sure damn is incredible and all these Parisians that she was in community with. Were going Of course, there was this kind of insouciance about them. It was like, losing face to be impressed.

It was cool to be unimpressed by anything. She realized after a while that's just the way that community was I don't know if it's a hola Paris, or just the people that she was with but it can become a way of being counted. And if that's your webbing I know, I know, I know, if you know everything is a problem, because you don't learn anything. It's like the old story of the Zen master, who is visited by a learned professor who says, tell me about Zen then. And the Zen master starts to pour a cup of tea, and continues pouring the cup fills. And the professor eventually says, You're spilling the tea, the cups full.

And the Zen Master says, if the cup is full, there's no room for anything else, by which of course, he meant. If you know everything, if you're a learned professor, and you think you know everything and you're coming from a place of judgment, you're not really going to learn very much at all. Now, there's a good exercise I recommend for looking good. You can try it on for an hour, a day, a week, see how you get on a minute, which is to say exactly what you mean. Not to embroider or Trump or make it bigger, but to be precise. Losing the hyperbole will come back to hyperbole and when we're dealing with how to deliver effective content, because hyperbole is very common.

So this is a great little exercise and try it on for a little while. exactly what you mean without having to exaggerate. Second leech being right. This gives rise to some pretty serious conversation of disruptors. First of all, the most easy way to be right is to make somebody else wrong, as we've discovered, and that is really damaging to communication. People can feel it when you're making them wrong when you're judging will come on to it in the seven deadly sins, and it stops them from receiving very much creates conflict.

Interrupting is another very common result of being right. And when you feel that somebody is making an incredibly wrong point, it's so tempting and I've said already with the journalists doing that it's becoming much more part of society. To be interrupting people, I have an exercise for that in a moment. There's a great phrase from the American author harville Hendricks, you can either be right or be in a relationship. But you can't snuggle up with being right at the end of the day. So it's something to be wary of the tendency, the need to be right all the time, drives a lot of conflict, and it's very divisive, for relationships.

Now, I said, I had an exercise for you if you're an interrupter. Are you an interrupter Hands up. If you are, I have a little exercise for you, which is when somebody's speaking, and you feel the need you feel that bubbling up is something that's got to be said, Take a deep breath before you speak. And you might just hear the other person is still speaking. That's a really powerful exercise. Don't bother counting to 10 or anything like that.

Those are a bit clunky. Just get into the habit of before you speak and then You might just have the time to notice the other person hasn't finished yet. Another great exercise, if you're in the habit of judging or condemning is to reflect and validate what somebody else has said. So to say, I heard you say this or So what you're saying is this. And that makes sense. I can understand, you know, I don't agree with you, but I can understand how you got to that point of view.

So validating what they said, saying it makes sense to me that you would say that even though I don't feel that and I don't agree with it, that's different. So let's move on to the third leech people pleasing, that is effectively saying yes, when you mean no or no, when you mean yes, not being true to your values, having your barriers, invaded, or just dropping them all together. And not as a friend of mine once said, standing in your own truth. You know, you might be really tired after a day's work. We're all going out for a drink. Do you want to come Oh, yeah, sure, half heartedly, because actually what you desperately want is to go home and have a cup of cocoa.

If you're doing that in order to be liked and to be popular, that's people pleasing. And although, again, I'm not saying it's always wrong, it's nice to please people. Nevertheless, if it becomes a driving force in your communication, you become less seriously taken because people will know that you change your point of view, depending on who you're with. You change what you say how you are, we all do a bit of a chameleon act, a human being is a multifaceted entity. And we're different with our parents to with our children, too, with our teachers, to with our students, to with our colleagues to you know, whoever it might be, we will be slightly different in each of those cases, very few people are absolutely the same everywhere. Nevertheless, if that becomes exaggerated in order to make people like us, then you're not being true to yourself.

Now, this is a great exercise here. I don't know if you've ever done this. I do recommend that You maybe pause the video now or after this chapter. Take this on, write down your values. What are your values? It's a very good idea to know it amazes me the number of people who've never thought about this.

If you know what your values are, you have a moral compass. You know, whether that cause of action or that course of action is more in tune with who you are as a human being, and what you want to achieve. It's quite nice if they are easy to remember. So I wouldn't recommend you have 15 or 20 values for six, maybe at the most, two or three, if you're happy with that, as long as you can remember them. I like acronyms. My values fortunately spell an easy to remember words.

So I remembered them through my whole life. And they are faith, by which I mean, not religious faith, but just comfort that all will be well in the future, faith in that things will work out loud We'll come back to that when we talk about the foundations of powerful speaking. I'm here I mean well wishing, acceptance, which is to say, this is the way things are. And there are certain things that can change certain things I can't, the ones I can't, there's no point reading about them. So acceptance is a big part of it. And gratitude.

So that's faith, love, acceptance. Gratitude flag is the word that spells and I know where I am with my values. I do recommend that you do the same thing and write down your values, what you really believe in, so that you can have a moral compass, and that will create a lot less tendency to people, please, if that's an issue for you. Finally, each fixing that is to say, not allowing other people to feel pain, it not being okay for you for somebody to be upset, don't be upset, don't cry. It'll be alright. Please don't cry.

You know, sometimes people need to be upset. Sometimes people need to express I was brought up in a family Where there was very little self expression. It was a very serene, but somewhat repressed environment. So I have to work at this. I have people around me who are much more expressive than I am. And sometimes that's uncomfortable.

I have to work at that to the exercise that I do recommend to you, if you've got the same kind of background as I have, is to work on enhancing self expression, allowing other people to have it without getting involved. You know, if somebody's in floods of tears, just holding them, they're going to understand, not Don't cry, it'll be all right, trying to make it better. And if you are also not comfortable with expressing emotion, then you can do lots of things like watch some Wi Fi movies and actually have a good cry and get practicing at expressing things more vividly than perhaps you're used to extending your range. The ultimate degree of that would be primal therapy. or something like that. But we don't all need to go that far.

But it is a very powerful thing to do to enhance your self expression and allow others to do the same. Again, fixing there's nothing wrong with trying to make people feel better and working on that. But if it becomes a driving force or if it's really not okay for you, that's somewhere to look. So how do the four leeches play out in your life? Take a moment. Now pause this chapter, I suggest and do some writing.

Writing is wonderful. Just write about how these four things play out for you. Looking good, being right, people pleasing and fixing and I'll see you back in a moment.