DAY 15 OF 100-DAYS SELF-REINVENTION SERIES - Learning To Listen – Strengthening Your Mental Resilience

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To access divine potential, you will need a head-by-pass surgery - Dr Leroy Thompson.

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“Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity. The greatest problem with communication is we don't listen to understand.

We listen to reply. When we listen with curiosity, we don't listen with the intent to reply. We listen for what's behind the words.” ― Roy T. Bennett, the Light in the Heart

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One of the advantages of learning how life works from the inside out rather than from outside in for me has been my increased ability to listen. The ability to listen to my wife, my kids, relatives, friends, colleagues, bosses and subordinates. Generally, because of a failure to recognize the principle of separate realities, we do not really listen. I believe that over 50% of what is being said in a conversation is lost because people are not listening to one another. Yet, there is no greater predictor of your success and happiness in life better than your ability to listen. As you go up in your career, there is an increased need for you to increase your ability to listen.

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Amy Jen Su and Muriel Maignan Wilkins writing for Harvard Business Review says “As your role grows in scale and influence, so too must your ability to listen. But listening is one of the toughest skills to master — and requires uncovering deeper barriers within oneself. The key, ironically, is to focus on yourself. While tactically, there are many ways to strengthen your listening skills, you must focus on the deeper, internal issues at stake to really improve. Listening is a skill that enables you to align people, decisions, and agendas. You cannot have leadership presence without hearing what others have to say”. Focus on yourself during a conversation, focus on the thoughts going on in your head, and focus on the meanings you are making.

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What are some of the barriers within yourself during a conversation? Tuned to a different voice/reality? Sometimes, we are involved in a conversation, but our mind is tuned to a different voice. A friend is excited about a new raise, he cannot just wait to share the experience with you, but your internal reality is just different. You are nothing near excitement; if anything, you are internally weighed down with unpaid bills, a failed exam, etc. As you begin to pay more attention to what reality you are living in and catch yourself not paying any attention to what is being said, practice taking your attention from your reality and begin to tell yourself that you need to know the reality of this friend. What reality is he in? As you do, something awesome will begin to happen in you. You will be very present in the conversation, and you will get new insights from his/her reality that will improve your own experience in the moment.

As meaning makers with a big Library of ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI), we have perceptions about almost every person we know, from spouses to kids, to friends, relatives, and workplace relationships. How about the AI programming that says the boss is wicked? As soon as the boss dials your extension and tells you to come for a 5 minutes chat in his office; listen to all the voices running wild in your head – “the selfish man has come again….idiot of a man….I know he doesn't like me after all, but I am going to pray him to Armageddon whether he likes it or not” and on and on your internal voice keeps crying out. But you see that AI programming is not REAL. You will get to the meeting and be muttering “finish and let me go”. Here is what your AI doesn't tell you, you are the ONLY person with the unique meaning that you have stored in your AI.

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Recently, I was listening to Dr. Dicken Berttinger give a lecture on how we experience life and he demonstrated that for every meaning we make there are over a million other possible meanings from the same event or interaction. As you begin to realize how life works in your daily encounters, as you walk to your boss office you will begin to tell your AI voice to be silent. Here is a thought experiment, the next time you hear your AI reeling out all these noises, just quietly speak to your AI voice, “shut up, the boss is just a human being like me and he has his internal struggles just like me and I am going to LEARN the reality from which he speaks”. You will be amazed the kind of conversation you will have with the boss that day. You see, life is spiritual and as spirits we can really feel from a deeper part of us when someone is really listening. We develop stronger bonds with people who really listen to us; people who are present when we are talking to them.

As we studied under the principle of separate realities, we are all living in separate realities. That we are born of the same parent does not translate to having the same experience of our parents. When I didn't have this understanding, I used to wonder why everyone else didn't see what I was seeing about the organization. I will walk to a colleague and share my thoughts on a subject and he or she will just be staring at me, wondering if I have lost my mind. The reason we have made different meanings from everyday business of the organization is that our experience of the organization differs. Even within ourselves, our experience of the organization changes from day to day.

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If you are like me, your AI has categorized every possible image. I see a person that looks like someone that I have known previously and instantly without any effort, I attribute all the AI of that known person to this one. Let's say the face, build and race or ethnicity matched someone I knew that my AI classified as troublesome. As soon as I get talking to the person, my AI begins to constantly warn me, “remember that troublesome guy?

This is how he looked; people like this are troublesome, remember that that they can pretend a lot, remember that they are deceivers…. Bla bla bla”. You see, that kind of thinking won't foster any meaningful dialogue.

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My wife once worked in a hospital in Northern Ireland with doctors from several countries. In that kind of multicultural setting, you hear doctors frame up expected behaviours based on countries of origin. A new doctor resumes and he is from India, instantly the

doctors from Africa “know” the behaviours to expect, because their AI has written programs according to the experience they have of the last Indian doctor.

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I have come across people that my AI wrote off as not being of any good and those persons have gone on to make a huge success of their lives. They are living a far “better” life than me. I had to confess once when interviewing people that I needed to de-bias myself and separate myself from my AI, to listen with curiosity and not with the attitude that I know it already. Here I am conducting an interview, and the fellow walks in, and my AI says you know people like this are not smart. Where is my AI getting this information? From past programming of images and behaviours. Now, as soon as that voice comes up, I just speak to myself “You do NOT know this person, listen to them to find out who they are”.

Many people enter new relationships and never really enjoy the relationships because of internal dialogues inside the AI warning them of what similar images represent and the dangers they pose. Sometimes I meet a fellow whom I knew 10 years ago, and my AI classification labelled him as a cheat. As soon as the person begins a discussion about money or a business deal, my AI shouts loud: remember he is a thief and cheat, he is going to lie to you again. You see, your AI made these recordings to protect you against being harmed by this person ten years ago. Is it possible this person is no

longer that person that you knew ten years ago? This is also true for a person you knew 10 years ago, and your AI makes a record of the person as honest and decent; 10 years is a lot, you may fall into trouble if you think the AI classification is still valid.

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I do not say to always ignore your AI but tell your AI that you want to really listen to this person. There are things that we all did 10 years ago, that we will never do again. In my faith parlance, we repented and moved on. Is it possible that this person has repented and moved on or unrepented? We cannot know by listening to our past recordings. When we begin to practice debiased listening, we get to the place where the voice of our spirit goes past our AI to tell us more about the person and to help us connect in ways far deeper than we can intellectually.

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Everything you need in this world is in your spirit. All the money, resources, friends, connections you will ever need resides there; but to access it, you will have to do a HEAD BYPASS SURGERY – you will have to rely less on your AI programming. You see, our spirit knows MUCH MORE than our minds and is superior to the databank of AI that runs our lives. We have shut up this intuition with our overdependence on our AI. But as we practice better listening skills, we will hear the spirit voice that transcends our AI to tell us what to do in every area of our lives. That won't happen overnight, I must warn you; but as you practice de-biased listening, you will get better at it and eventually you will come to the place where you will begin to have effortless conversations that are deeply spiritual and refreshing.