Listening

Joe: When you're listening in that attuned way, we evolve. The things that need to come to the surface, come to the surface, you unfold quicker. 

Brett: Welcome to the Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler here today with my co-host, Joe Hudson.

All right, so one of the first things that we do in this work is that we teach people how to listen. And it's also interesting that it's not just one of the first things that happens in the work, it's also one of the things that happens in the middle, and later on in some of our more advanced courses, we come straight back to listening. And so we've used the metaphor of the sushi rights before to talk about some of these really basic, kind of one oh ones that aren't really one oh ones. They're actually some of the whole practice that you just get deeper and deeper on and so I'd love to get deeper on the topic of listening today. How's that sound? 

Joe: Yeah, that sounds great. 

Brett: Great. So let's get into it. What, in the way that we speak about it in this work, what is listening and what is it not? 

Joe: Yeah, so, here's the weird part about listening is that there's no moment of awake consciousness where you're not listening.

So you're always listening to something. Maybe you're listening to the thoughts in your head, or maybe you're listening to the other person, or maybe you're listening to the pain in your foot, but your awareness is always on something. So there's a way in which you're always listening. So there's a caliber of listening or there's an attention given to listening that changes a lot. And so just as a, like a very simple experiment, if right now you put all of your attention, if you're listening to this, put all of your attention on your inner ear. Just keep all the focus on your inner ear. There's a way in which you're listening to the inner ear, but there's also a way in which you still are comprehending everything that I'm saying, even though your attention is in your inner ear, and that's a very specific quality of listening.

Do another experiment, so instead of listening, paying attention to your inner ear, listening to your inner ear, see what it's like to listen to the silence that surrounds my words. That's in between my words or the frequencies that are silent. Even when I'm talking, if you put all of your focus on the silence, again, you still understand what I'm saying, but the quality of listening has changed a little bit.

When we talk about listening, one of the ways to think about it is we're actually putting our attention to the listening. We're putting our attention on the listening, which is a very deep receiving, allowing. It's like the world is coming to you is the feeling of it, if you're really listening. The other quality of it is that you're attuning, like there's an attunement that happens when you listen and it happens naturally.

You don't have to tell yourself to attune. If you're deeply listening to yourself, you're attuning to yourself. If you're deeply listening to another person, you're attuning to them. If you're deeply listening to the sensations in your body, you're attuning to that, which means that you're showing up in a way that there's a lot of care, respect, understanding would be some of the things that come out of that naturally. And so listening is really important and typically what happens is when people are listening, they bring a cap other qualities to it. I'm listening so I can figure out what I'm gonna say next, or I'm listening to help fix you or to be of value, or to judge you, or judge myself or fix myself or, and the listening gets diluted by the attention, not just going to listening, but the attention going to how am I gonna interact? What am I gonna do next? What will, like, how do I feel safe in this environment? So when we're teaching listening, and as like when we teach, like the first thing that happens if you're interested in coaching with us at all is this very long, long like set of sessions around listening.

What we're really teaching is that place where you go, where you are, your attention is in the listening, and you're listening to yourself and another person simultaneously, and which is exactly what view is pointing to in, the connection course as well. Though we don't talk about listening specifically there very much, it is the same pointer. 

Brett: Yeah. There's a lot to unpack from what you just said. There's the tuning, which kind of makes me think of tuning in like a radio station. What is it that you're tuning into or what is the channel that you're listening on? The inner ear is an interesting one, the tension in your feet. Also with the intention, are you listening from a place of preparing to respond, from a place of trying to remember what, like the words that are being said or the concepts? Which is a very different thing from just letting it land in the body and be the episodic memory of what was said being lost, but the energetics really landing and being grokked. So what are some things that you'd say would stand in the way of listening? 

Joe: Yeah, so again, there's one way to think about it, which is you're always listening so nothing can stand in the way of it. And I keep on repeating that because one of the things that the mind will do is it'll make listening a to-do, a challenge, you have to start trying, and all of that is what gets in the way of the listening.

Brett: Trying is not receiving. 

Joe: Yeah, exactly. So I keep on saying it's all there, all naturally, because that allows you to find the listening more easily because it's just an allowing, it's just a receiving. Thinking that you have to do something gets in the way of listening.

The other thing that gets in the way of listening in the most deep way of listening is thinking that you have to do something to be valuable or useful. If you really are listening, you'll, what you'll start noticing is actions arise from the listening, instead of from the like, Ooh, I need to be of value. Ooh, I'm scared they're gonna get upset at me. Ooh, I'm right. There's just like this. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: Deep listening. The other thing that gets in the way of it is going into the future, in the past often gets in the way of listening. So some way in which you try to manage the future or have managed the past is gonna management really in any way gets in the way of listening.

Brett: Yeah. I was gonna say, everything you just described sounded like a form of management listening so that something can happen, so that I can respond in a certain way, so certain outcomes occur. Listening with an eye towards the future or the past being seen in a certain way or being managed to an outcome.

Yeah. So the way of listening that we practice is a non-management way of listening. 

Joe: Correct. And it also creates a deep presence 'cause it can only happen right now, which is a state of presence. And what's interesting is that it's at some point as you really learn to listen, you can speak about the future from a deep listening place and you can speak about the past from a deep listening place.

But you're not managing the future or managing the past. So that's it. And there's a quality, if you did that experiment about listening to the silence or listening to the inner ear or listening to your body, while I'm speaking, you'll notice that there's a kind of a feeling of expansion that occurs.

It's almost like your awareness becomes bigger and it becomes more in the forefront. There's more spaciousness that happens. And so there is a somatic experience that goes with a deep listening. And so your body can recognize when it's listening in a way that your mind can't always. 

Brett: Yeah.

I'd like to go a little bit deeper into that because the way that we're often used to listening is to listen conceptually, listen intellectually, listen to ideas or content. And the way that we're talking about it right now is listening with the body, listening with your inner ear, listening with awareness and can you talk a little bit more about how you somatically experience listening?

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: How that changes the quality of a conversation or the quality of the data that you gather? 

Joe: Yeah, so on the listening to concepts piece of it, that's what the mind might be noticing, the prefrontal cortex might be noticing that, but we're listening in other ways all the time as well. Whether we're conscious of them or not is another thing. Meaning, like we might not be listening to the fact that our body like totally constricts when someone gets angry at us and we don't want to feel it. And so we jump on social media because that can constriction is I want to go on, but our body, there was a listening that happened, you weren't conscious of it, that created that outcome. So one of the things that I noticed is that when people are just listening to the concepts, there's a way in which they don't grok the rest of it, but when you are listening to the silence or your body, you do grok the rest of it as it turns out.

What's interesting about it is you might, like your mind catches up, is the experience, your mind is ha, like you're like just listening and then all of a sudden you get it instead of you're getting it. Got it. So it's more like the way you would understand a river by just sitting by the river for a while.

And all of a sudden you start noticing things like, oh, the eddies happen on the side and the flow happens in the middle and there's something that's happening at a different, like the water's moving at a different pace underneath than it is at the top. Just stuff you can't grok any other way, but just to be sitting by a river or like people I know who rode rivers for years, they understand a river in a way that a scientist couldn't.

They can read the water and there's a way that you get things that the mind has to catch up with and maybe sometimes doesn't even understand, like the way a basketball player might know how to do a fake without fully intellectualizing it. But they know that when they move that little shoulder before they turn left, that they always get around the guard or whatnot.

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: So there's that aspect of it. I noticed that I can listen from a place of awareness and wholeness and silence, and I never have a problem grokking information that's being handed to me, or I do, but not anymore than if I'm fully in my head listening. It's just that it requires me not to worry if I'm getting it.

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: If I worry if I'm getting it, then I'm screwed. So it just requires like a, it's almost like a trust. It's a trust until it's not. It's like I know that this will happen and then it's oh, will the ice be cold? I have to trust that the ice is cold. And then at some point you're like, ice is cold. I don't need to trust that, but there is that process of learning to trust that just listening will get you there. 

Brett: And in some cases that ice for me sometimes feels like the sense of knowing. If I'm listening to you right now from the sense of oh, I know what we're talking about.

We've been doing a lot of listening together, then all of your words get filtered through my preconception of what I think you're talking about and that's a pretty harsh filter. If I'm sitting in the unknown, I have no idea what Joe's about to say. In fact, you're, the internet just cut out a minute ago and I couldn't hear about 15 seconds of what you said, but I was like practicing the, just like being with it and listening and when you came back, I just felt the energy in your voice and I was here's where we are and then was able to continue much, much more than oh shit, I'm lost. I didn't hear the past 15 seconds. 

Joe: Yeah. It does the same thing with, oh, I have to get this too. So you're saying listening through the filter of knowing, which is living in the past. I know this thing, it will filter out what you hear living in the idea of, oh, I have to get, this will also filter out what you hear.

And so, in a weird way, the deeper forms of listening have less filters on them, or the filters are more natural, is a way to express it. My experience is of the wider forms of listening, the listening that are like embodied listening, what it does is it's like the important information comes to the surface easily, more easily.

The signal to noise ratio gets better, but it, you have to experiment with that. You can't ever trust that's just like a thing that you do enough, and then you're like, oh, wow, shit. That works. It's, can it be that easy? Yes. It's that easy. 

Brett: Yeah. Given that so much of what we've talked about with listening is about filtering. We're like talking about what is being filtered, what's not being filtered and it might be in relation to a person. How does that work with your reality? How does the quality of listening affect your reality? 

Joe: Filter your reality, tremendously. It's an interesting thing 'cause I see so many people worried about what they're gonna say, what they're gonna do, how they're gonna do it, who's gonna see it, how some people think about them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And it's all about like their capacity to penetrate somebody else, like influence and affect other people. What's fascinating to me is that my experiences listening is one of the deepest ways of affecting your reality. How the caliber, the quality of your listening, it affects what people are gonna say to you. It affects the information that you're gonna gather. But if, let's say you're doing business and your quality of listening is gonna affect how good your product is, it's gonna affect how happy your customers are. It's gonna affect how much your employees are happy, how much they feel heard.

Like it has a tremendous effect on your reality. And that's just the external. Internally, when you're listening and you're listening in that attuned way, this is externally as well, but internally when you're listening in that attuned way, like we evolve quicker. It's like there's an, there's just something that happens where it's like the things that need to come to the surface, come to the surface.

There's a respect, there's an attunement. If a child is deeply attuned to as a kid, they just develop holistically, quicker, better, and so it's the same with ourselves. It's in a weird way, you can say meditation is a listening of oneself. And obviously a lot of people do it in a way to manage themselves, which isn't a listening.

But at some point in your meditation you've come across the idea that it's oh, it's non-management. It's all just listening. And you'll just notice the development happen. So, it influences not just what comes to you in the world, the quality of people, the kinds of information, the way people interact with you. If you think in your life, who is the people in my life who listen the best and here's what you probably don't feel like, what an asshole. You're like, oh, that person, I love that person. They listen to me, like they're a good listener. And so you influenced how people show up, who shows up, what information you get, and you unfold quicker, the more that your capacity to listen is and the people around you unfold quicker. 

Brett: Yeah. What you just said about how listening really well is also listening to yourself and like meditation essentially, forms of it, can be listening to yourself really ties together a couple of things we've been talking about here, because when we've said that you can listen from your whole body. There's also a way that what that is that you're listening to the way your body's responding to what's being said.

So your body's, as you said earlier, you're always listening. There's a phenomenon that we've talked about where sometimes somebody will say something completely illogical, but they'll say it with conviction. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: You see this all over the world right now. They'll say it with conviction. And people will believe the content because what they're actually picking up is a conviction. And so it's like there's a way that the body responds to conviction in a way that might, for some people, feel like safety, might be like, okay, yeah, I can trust this. There's conviction here. And they're not recognizing, unless you're listening to your body to the extent where you're like, oh, I noticed that there's something about the way this person speaking that makes me feel safe and it doesn't seem related to the content and I can separate that out and be like, maybe it's not actually the words that I'm hearing that I'm responding to right now. 

Joe: Yeah. So yeah, that's an a really interesting point about listening generally. Like one of the things that's important in our teaching about listening is that it, you don't put yourself entirely in the other person.

If you put yourself entirely in the other person it's not really listening. There's almost like a trying to influence, trying to make sure that they feel safe, trying to make sure that, like they're cared for, intended to, which is another form of management.

It like the deeper forms of listening, you're always have some percentage of your awareness in yourself. Which is an incredibly useful thing, like you said, with, oh I'm feeling their conviction, not the intelligence of what they're saying. But also I noticed that people who are good at listening to themselves, they're less likely to fall for the con.

They're less likely to ignore, the boyfriend who's gonna turn abusive. They're less likely to run away from themselves, abandon themselves to make somebody else happy, et cetera, et cetera. Because the information you're getting isn't just from the head. Yeah. The information you're getting is how your body's reacting and you get that mirror.

Brett: Yeah. How is my heart responding to this? Someone saying things that sound nice to me or giving me approval, but what, why is my gut feeling the way it's feeling right now? 

Joe: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, listening has always got, there's an aspect of a tension in your own body to it. If you're listening in that very, in a deep way, it's interesting because it's you that's a little bit counterintuitive. Oh, if I'm listening to you, I'm fully in you. But it's, that's more management and chasing you than it is being. 

Brett: Or even the notion that if I'm listening to you, I'll remember all of the factual things that you said, which you know, I may be getting more facts. The facts might be more about, might be more inclusive of my response to you and how my, all the different intelligences in my system are hearing what you're saying. And so there's sometimes a bit of a paradox or kind of something counterintuitive where I might come away from a conversation, this especially happens in coaching sessions where the details just go right in and out, but something much deeper lands and stays. And then a part of the relationship, it's become more like both parties can become more aware of whatever that is that doesn't have words. And there can be more connection with less episodic memory and content being remembered.

Joe: Yeah. And there's something else that happens like, you know this, so when we're doing like an in-person retreat, we really ask people not to take notes. And we try to take any notes and the important notes in advance for them because though they might get it more in their head, they don't get it in their whole body. And so trying to remember information often makes it that you understand it intellectually, but you don't understand it in your body. 

Brett: Yeah. And that brings me to another question here, is a lot of what we've been talking about with listening is on the receiving side when someone else is speaking, and that might create the idea that you stop listening to speak or ask a question. But as we've been saying you're always listening. So how what's your sense of how listening continues while speaking and asking a question? I asked that from the sensation in my body as the question comes through, I'm in, in that practice. 

Joe: Exactly. I was gonna say you, it's funny to watch you have a question that you're actually doing.

But yeah, great question. I notice that when I'm listening and talking, when I'm in that deep form of listening, I'm talking at the same time, I am very curious about what the fuck's gonna come outta my mouth. It's like I am experiencing it for the first time. It's like it's an unfolding that delights me the way, like watching grass, with a little bit of wind in it delights me.

It's like this, I am listening to the it feels like a channeling almost, and i'll say to people who are interested in it that it takes a while to get there. There's a lot of listening that happens, typically, at least for me, it was a lot of listening that had to happen before I could speak from that place. And then it becomes like second nature 'cause it's so much more enjoyable, so much more pleasant to be listening in that way. 

Brett: Yeah. It comes back to the filters we were talking about, listening in a way that is reducing the filters or using just a different set of more subtle filters.

The same thing when you're listening to yourself for the impulse to speak, there's a very subtle impulse that you can hear that's a very different one from the one that already thinks it knows what to say or is speaking from identity or personality or pattern or a role. 

Joe: Yeah. The other thing that I'll say is like, if you're listening to this, then somebody might be like, making this into a rule or morality or something. And I would say, watch out for that. Listen. If you listen to your body, if you listen to awareness, if you listen to listening, notice how it thinks about making a rule or making it a morality or making it something that you have to do.

It almost feels like when you have to do it, it's the opposite of doing it. So I just want to put that warning out there for people. Somebody's gonna listen and say, okay, now once I listen right, I'll be blah, blah, blah, blah. It's much more of a oh, what a joy. What a joy it is to listen like this.

Brett: Yeah. I'm also curious to talk about listening in business. What happens if someone's listening in a board meeting, listening in a sales meeting, listening to a customer? 

Joe: Let's talk about what happens when you don't listen. People don't feel heard. People feel pissed off. There's a lot more power struggles. Inefficiency abounds. Everybody's fighting to be heard or decided they can't be heard. You don't get the best ideas. If you look at, say, like the Aristotle project that Google did, and one of the things they saw was that really functional teams were ones where everybody felt really comfortable speaking and contrary opinions were comfortable and that there was actually everybody's voice was heard, that the relevant voices were heard to the problem.

That only happens if people feel listened to. That doesn't happen any other way. So more functional teams, less likely to get duped in a deal, more likely to get a deal done because, for instance, I noticed that like when we were interviewing CEOs as a venture capitalist, I always knew who would get picked and they were the people who were asking a bunch of questions.

So the ones who asked questions and then listened were the ones who get the job. The ones who were answering questions usually were not the ones to get the job. If you listen to what a venture capitalist wants to hear before you tell them, it's probably better. If you listen to what the customer wants before you pitch them, it's probably better.

So listening basically is one of the most profound ways to make your business accelerate quicker. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: Rather than, coming up with an idea, I got an idea and I'm gonna go present it and see what happens. That's not bad, especially if then you listen and see what happens and change because you've been listening.

But like the iteration, even if you're in a high iteration, listening is half of the iterative process. So listening is just critical and unfortunately not what a lot of leaders do. Some leaders are great at it, many of them aren't. And when I see leaders who are like not just successful, but have a certain level of peace in them, they're all really good listeners. And they do things like if they're senior, they're the last person to speak in a meeting. Like they're, if a decision gets made, the most junior person starts because they know their opinion's gonna influence other folks. They're just really good listeners 'cause they know that there's intelligence everywhere. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: And that they can learn to mine it if they listen. 

Brett: Yeah. And now of course, in, in the context of leadership, I can imagine people having a question of this sounds pretty passive. If you're gonna run meetings and everyone gets to speak in all of the meetings, are you ever gonna get anything done?

And it brings back the question of filtering. So, there's a way that, you might be sitting with somebody and you're like, I'm just gonna listen to whatever you have to say for the next hour. I don't need to change or filter that. I'm just here with you. And then there's times where you're like, we've got one hour to decide the direction for the business with a bunch of stakeholders, with disagreements and so how does listening come in, in, in that way in, say, leadership or, sometimes in your in coaching sessions where there's times where we will cut people off in the mid-sentence because we're really listening on a different level and have another question that just comes through.

So how does that interplay work with listening from what might be perceived as a passive listening place to listening in such a way that's like deeply engaging and filtering in real time with a group, for example. 

Joe: Yeah, I thought about, we just did a retrospective of the decision course and you were there obviously and we all had very different ideas of what needed to change in that course.

And we like if I think in most companies it would've been like ended in disagreement in some sort of power struggle and blah, blah, blah, blah. And we all came in with very different opinions. Everybody spoke their opinion, everybody said what was important to them and we all walked away going, oh, that felt great and we know what to do.

And we all felt good about what was gonna happen next. It might not have seemed like anybody was listening, but everybody like deeply considered what was being said, saw the truth in it, whatever was being said. And that's what allowed that movement to happen. It was like I could say to somebody, oh, whoa, you just came down so hard on that.

It might stop people from presenting other information. Okay. Yeah. That's not what I meant. Okay. It was like that kind of thing was happening all over the call and what did you mean there? Okay. How did that, oh yeah. Okay. I see how that connects to my thought over here and that's what was happening. And that comes from the listening. So the listening, like you said, and I said, listening is always happening whether you're talking or not, whether you're taking action or not. It's not a time when you stop listening. The question is, are you in that state of like whole body, present listening, for lack of better words, while you're talking, while you're doing? 

Brett: Yeah. And I noticed there, there was a structure to the meeting that made it feel like I could just listen to whatever point we were in the meeting, there were certain things that were being discussed in a certain format.

And so that there's a way that having structure in a conversation or, a coaching session or in a meeting can create more spaciousness for listening in certain ways. And also sometimes it's best just to have no structure. If your kid's having a tantrum, you're not like, okay, now we're gonna do this phase of the tantrum and then we're gonna do the solutions phase. Or I don't know, maybe you do? But how do you see that structure playing into listening? 

Joe: Yeah, we just did a brainstorming session and that was like a group listening. So we were doing, we're starting the YouTube channel and we were thinking about like how to do teaching videos and Mark and Kat came over to the house and we had a whole bunch of shit to do and we just sat around and had breakfast and wandered and talked and exchanged ideas and we were like little anxiety of oh, are we gonna get anything done? And all of a sudden pop the thing showed up and we were like, oh, there it is. And we had the most fun day of, and I believe that the, I just saw some of the first products of that of that brainstorming session and I'm like, wow, this is so much better than what we were doing before and that came from like a listening of no action isn't right right now, even though we have a time crunch. And we were all listening together for that creative thing. And so when you see these big companies lose their creativity, we're not creating new shit anymore, we're just refining stuff. It's because there isn't that spaciousness to actually listen for it, wait for it to come, and then follow it. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: It feels like a channeling. 

Brett: Yeah, once there's an identity, like once the company or the team has an identity, this is what we are, this is who we are, this is how we do it, there's ways that can provide a lot of structure and direction. And there's also ways that can add a whole new layer of filters. 

Joe: Yes. Exactly. And some filters are great in a company like you have, you wanna stay on brand and you wanna make sure that like you're serving your clients and those kind of things, and those filters are great. And there's just like a waiting for it instead of forcing it instead of a management, there's just a, I know it's gonna come, I'm gonna trust. Just like you would talking from a place of listening. 

Brett: Yeah. So now I wanna flip this around a little bit. People may be listening to this and they're like, oh yeah, listening's great. I love it when people listen to me. How do I get everybody in my life to listen better? 

Joe: You don't stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.

If you really want everybody in your life to start listening to you better, start listening better. That's like the best possible way to do it. And concerning yourself with, the way I'd say it this way is if you concern yourself with how people are listening to you, then you are not listening to yourself and you're not listening to them.

And it's not within your control. And the more you do it, the more you try to get someone to listen to you, the more controlled they feel and the less likely they are to listen to you. So if you really want people to listen to you, then I would say, listen, just become a great listener.

And then A, it doesn't matter if they listen to you, and B, they're more likely to listen to you because what we really want is to listen to ourselves. If we're listening to ourselves, what other people do, doesn't matter so much. 

Brett: Yeah. We will be able to trust that we navigate that world, however is best for us.

Joe: Exactly. Awesome.

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: Wow. What a fun conversation. Thank you, Brett. 

Brett: Yeah, I enjoyed it. It had an extra spacious quality to it. 

Joe: It did. Yeah. I think we were both listening deeply as we were having the conversation. That was fun. 

Brett: Yeah, it was cool. Thank you, Joe, and thank you everybody for listening.

Joe: You're welcome. Yeah, thank you. 

Brett: Take care. Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and rate us on your podcast app. We'd love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions or comments. You can reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.