Most of my life I thought I knew how to listen. But all I was doing was trying to be heard.

I thought communication was about getting my point across; teaching something, saying something, contributing, and my most ugly habit, proving and defending myself. It’s not.

Communication is only something that happens when we know how to listen. We have to get out of our own head and see the world through the other persons’ eyes…and feel them. We are feeling beings that think, not the other way around and this is why so much of what we say and hear is distorted. We can actually only mentally process 50 bits of the 11 million coming through (fucking WHAT? right, I know). The rest we just make up based on the past or what our brain generalises.

This means, well, nothing is real, but also if we only hear with our minds, we have no fucking chance at all of ever connecting genuinely. When I started travelling the world about six years ago, I realised communication is so much more about feeling the other person. Without words, I had to sense, watch their motion, their face, their energy and I began to understand that communication is a magical form of connection if we use it to be with another human.

To connect, empathise, hold space and allow them to express. There’s a load of science on this which I equally froth on. For those who feel they don’t need to be ‘heard’, this might seem odd and even useless. Trivial, perhaps. But if you consider yourself a human, then you and I both know you still need connection and contribution to thrive.

Know this, to listen: to feel and see the world of another by placing your opinions, knowledge, view, desire to be heard, respond or contribute aside and open the space, you’ll experience the wholeness of connection simply by holding that space for another and experience that giving through being. In full. Listening is not about you (me).

It’s about connection. If we are in our head, we aren’t listening, we are waiting to respond or work out how to be heard. Our head/ego is in charge and we sever true connection and sacrifice it for the sake of what? To be seen? To rebuild your sense of self with a response? It’s an empty feat.

Tip of the day, if you want to be seen, then take the time to place your head aside and really listen, feel another. P.S. If you want to clear your head in order to listen well, consider clearing your emotions. I have a free audio you can use to do this – Feel Free in 15 Minutes