Practice listening

- I'll give you a dangerous exercise, and I'll tell you afterwards why it's dangerous. Take a person that's dear to you, and without telling them anything, just go and practice this listening. You can ask a simple question like, how was your day? or what's on your mind? And then do these four things, listen quietly, then encourage them, summarize and validate their feelings and their thoughts. Why is this dangerous? Let me tell you a story of something that happened in China. I was teaching the class in China with a translator and I gave the audience this exercise to go home in the evening and do that, with their spouses or their children. So the next day in the morning the first activity was they had to report what happened. This guy stands up and says in Chinese and the translator is telling me, "I have a story." And then he stands up and the translator stops because I see the guy speaking Chinese. I didn't know what he was saying, then he pulls up a phone and he puts a microphone next to the phone and there's Chinese happening and then everybody bursts out laughing like crazy. I am like, whoa, what happened here? So then the translator tells me what happened and here's the translation of the conversation. The guy went home, I mean, he was in Shanghai. He was not from Shanghai, so he called his wife. So he called his wife and in the phone he simply says, "How was your day?" And she started speaking and said, "Mm, mhmm, so you felt that?" And he's doing a really good job. And then suddenly the wife stops and says, "What's wrong?" And that's when everybody bursts out laughing and the guy says, "Nothing's wrong, why are you asking?" "You never listen to me, why are you listening to me?" But she was like angry. He said, "Don't you like it?" "I don't know if I like it, why are you listening to me? "Something's wrong." And people are just rolling on the floor with laughter because, I mean she was very suspicious. It's like bringing me flowers. I mean, what have you done? I mean, there must be some reason why you are bringing me, You must have done something terrible because you never, ever in your life listen to me, and now you're listening to me. So finally he confessed this was an exercise. And anyway, that was the story. But if you just do this exercise, you may shock people, because very few times we get listened with such disarming openness. So be careful, I mean, do it slowly. But try, just try what happens. If you go to your your kid for example, and just say, "Hey, how was your day at school?" or "What's on your mind? or "Tell me something that's important to you," and you just listen. I've done this exercise with parents and children. And I had this huge workshop planned. This was in Peru. I was going to to do all this workshop and it was kind of challenging, the parents and the kids were not getting along. And then I just thought, well, I'll do this exercise. It changed the workshop. I mean, after this, we couldn't do any more because they got so deep into the conversations that they didn't want to do any other exercise. Because really it was with teenagers for the first time ever, the kids felt that their parents were listening to what they said. And they just didn't want to do anything else. So, in a sense, they ruined my plans because I have all these great ideas for the workshop. But in another sense the workshop worked. It opened the door for them to have very different conflict resolution conversation.