Tag Archives: patience

Listening requires Discipline, too.

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One competency that people often lack is the ability to listen. I recall as a husband and as a school pupil the accusation that ‘you never listen’, but I don’t recall the lessons in listening that accompanied literacy and numeracy. Do you? Do you remember being taught attention management as a listener rather than as a teacher? Nope? Me neither.

Listening is a skill. The ability to not just hear what is being said, but also to see how it is being said and to understand why it is being said are the three elements of good listening. They are summarised in the expression that good listening requires HEART – an ART of using the EAR to HEAR what’s in the HEART. Yes, I know – ouch. Yet perfectly apt.

The ability to truly understand through listening is therefore a competence, one that can be studied, learned and finally applied. But all of that competence requires something else, something that underpins all learning.

Discipline.

Not just discipline required to apply oneself to the learning of the competence, though. That’s only half the story.

Discipline is also required to actually apply that learned skill at the appropriate moment. It means pausing in the gap between hearing someone say, “I want to tell you something” and the knee-jerk “Not now, I’m busy” which we tend to apply.

Not as easy as learning about how to listen, I’m afraid. We all live in our own world, and other people’s need to intrude upon our inner peace (i.e. while watching Line of Duty) tends to lie secondary to what we have ‘going on’ in our own heads. It takes discipline to decide to be present for another person. Until that discipline can be applied, all the listening training in the world won’t make you a great listener.

It’s easier to pause and listen to someone important to you in an intimate sense – immediate family, best friends, and so on. It’s also arguably easier to listen at a time of crisis, because the crisis is salient, it’s ‘in yer face’ and can’t be avoided.

But there are times when someone needs to be heard, but there is no obvious sense of urgency and so the moment is missed because the intended listener hasn’t developed the skill, and discipline, to be (a) willing to listen and (b) able to see that listening is needed now.

Next time someone seeks to attract your attention, pause and ask yourself – am I ready and willing to take the time to understand why this person wants me at this moment? That pause will inevitably result in better communication, even if the result is to arrange a better time for the conversation – the individual knows they have been and will be heard if the counsellor actively acknowledges that there is a conversation required.

Not easy.

But try.

Time to step up – and this time I mean ME.

10 Sunday Jul 2016

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I was reading Black Hole Focus by Dr Isaiah Hankel this week, having scanned it in bookshops and considered the content as ‘readable’. Truth is, it’s a bit Anthony Robbins so far, in that the ideas and methods reflect the Big Man’s methods and ideas. That’s not necessarily a negative criticism because if a method or philosophy works then any personal development book will have the same stuff in it. (Which is why I really must stop buying them….)

(BTW, in my defence there is a systematic structure to the philosophy of The Three Resolutions so it is a bit of a lot different.)

One of the concepts Hankel suggests we use is to ‘Name Your Purpose’, which resonates with me as a proponent of Personal Mission Statements. It’s about creating an identity for what you want to achieve, so that it becomes a little more real to you and to your subconscious.

As you know, the name I use for my long term mission statement is the Three Resolutions, but this week I began to seek an outcome which I also named, called the Mastery 55 Project.

In December I turn 55, and my poorly restrained human failings have led me to gain weight, a whole stone in 12 months. (Mainly over Christmas…..) I’ve also developed a less than frenetic work ethic, so even though I do all that is required of me there is a personal sense that I could be getting a lot more done, as mastery and expertise on the TV programme The West Wing is not necessarily a valuable life skill. And I am prone to impatience. (that sentence is quite long enough, dammit!)

Therefore, despite my preaching about character and integrity, I feel I am not walking my own talk. Hence the project, through which I intend to lose all my gained weight, recapture a higher level of physical fitness, increase my productivity, regain that sense of calm and just become ‘better’ by my 55th birthday.

I am tweeting through @mastery55project and a blog can be accessed through the above link, or here if you can’t go back that far. (See patience.)

The project has a its own name, but it does not replace my mission statement as much as it serves it in specific areas, particularly the self-discipline, First Resolution element.

We all, except the saints, veer off course occasionally. It’s how quickly we are willing to correct our course and get back on the right road.

And one method I am using to reinforce my intent is to review my own book, The Three Resolutions! The best way YOU can keep me honest is to read it and challenge me to live by it.

You are my accountability partners. Thank you.

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Self-preservation through Unified Living

09 Saturday Aug 2014

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Living your values, it is generally accepted in the personal development field, is the best way to ensure high personal self-esteem and life-long happiness. Charles Hobbs (TimePower) and Hyrum Smith (FranklinCovey) both specifically address how living in accordance with your highest universal principles – your own set of genuine, conscience driven rules and standards – is the best way to feel successful, because it is intrinsic (part of you) and no dependant on outside approval, social acceptance or material wealth. Living your values means serenity and peace. And violating them brings anxiety, guilt and even depression.

How do I know this? From experience, that’s how.

A couple of days ago I was merrily driving along, using the correct driving principles as taught to me by skilled police drivers, and adhering to the speed limit when a chap drove up behind me so close I couldn’t see his headlights. Considering we were in a 30mph limited road which was on the approach to a roundabout this seemed a bit silly, but I didn’t bite. I just raised my hand in a circle, separated the finger and thumb, and indicated thereby that perhaps the driver may consider pulling back a tad. He did so, and I gave him the thumbs up. Just as he accelerated hard and overtook so that he was still on the wrong side of the road as we came to the bollard at the roundabout entrance.

Now, if I had been proactive and used the stimulus/response gap to think ‘he’s a nutter so I’ll give him space’, things would have been fine. However, in that instant, I chose the ‘oh, we’ll see who can get to the gap first then, shall we?’ reactive technique. As it was, there was just enough – by inches – space so that no collisions occurred and I was able to add a verbal description of the driver through our mutually open car windows before we went I our separate directions.

And for the rest of the day I felt really off.

I felt off because I had failed to act in accordance with my unifying principle ‘I demonstrate high levels of skill and patience in driving.’ I felt off because I had not considered that circumstances like this lead to potential confrontation and while I am not fearful of ‘it’, confrontation is such an open ended activity. If I win the immediate confrontation I have no guarantee that it stops when it is over, especially these days when violence and revenge and utter stupidity seem to be the watchword of people whose first response is reactive thuggery, rather than being dragged slowly towards that end. Would I find that he would torch my car, find out where I live and threaten my kinfolk? If there had been a rumble, even if I had won what could the legal consequences have been? Was I prepared for them, did I want or need such inconvenience? And if the road hadn’t been wide enough, was I prepared to spend money and time repairing my car because I was reactively miffed?

Over the remainder of the day (and my reaction still irked me at bedtime) it occurred to me that, occasionally, it is not the highest ideals that we find hard to live up to, but the tiny ones. Say we choose to study, and do so diligently towards a professional qualification. It’s hard, but it’s doable. At the same time we resolve to be patient, and then someone jumps into the front of a queue and we go nuts. In many ways the patience objective is the easiest – easy to understand, easy to see ourselves doing it, easy to define – but the stimulus to challenge it can be too sudden and we have no time to think (correction, we do not take the time to think) and so we fail.

It’s a lesson we should all consider to be valuable. We have failed, so next time we won’t. It’s a demonstration that we are compliant with both the First and Second Resolutions. We discipline ourselves to be patient, deny ourselves the counterfeit sense of righteousness that the offending behaviour can engender within us, and our character shines through (with some competence in patientology).

Next time – just drive off ahead of the tailgater, or let him go. Let him offend and endanger someone else – I am too important to me and to my family and friends to suffer because of my own ego.

As are you.

Blog Part
Only two pounds lost this week but the running programme continues apace (see what I did there?). This weight loss means (if it continues at 2lbs per week) I may miss my 1/9/ target but as the months differ in lengths I anticipate that any slide back will be compensated for by 1/10/14. The diet remains easy to comply with, too.