How To Listen Others Into Existence

live, why don't you go ahead and type in where you are from. And I am from a place called Prather, California, between Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks. So why don't you let us know where you're from as you come in. We'll start right sharp at 11 o'clock. And as we, as I go through the presentation about how to listen other people into existence, feel free to type in your questions in the chat box and I will try to answer them as I can. And hopefully you'll find this to be a very provocative and thoughtful presentation that will give you pause about thinking about emotions. So we'll start in just a minute. So for those of you that are tuning in and don't know who I am, I am a lawyer turned a peacemaker, and I practiced law for 22 years and then left the practice of law I have a master's degree in peacemaking and conflict studies, and I have devoted my life to teaching people how to be at peace with themselves and with each other. And one of the foundational skills I teach is how to listen other people into existence. I do these Facebook Live and simulcast onto YouTube every Thursday morning at 11 o'clock Pacific. And each week I take on a different topic around the things that I like to think about and teach. And so today it's how to listen other people into existence. And again, if you're just joining us, type in where you're from in the chat room. We can see where people are from, and be sure to ask questions along the way. Okay, 11 o'clock, let's get started. So the title of this talk is How to Listen Other People into Existence. I get a lot of people asking me, what are you talking about? What does it mean to listen other people into existence? And since I get this question so much, I thought that it would be worthwhile to take half an hour, which is about how long I'm going to talk today, and teach you what it means to listen other people into existence. You will learn that it is one of the most powerful foundational skills of life that you can possibly imagine. So let's get started. I'm going to flip myself here so we can see the slides, and I'll put myself down in the corner. So what, what I'm going to do is take a few minutes and talk about, um, some what would seem to be offbeat topics, off the topic of listening others into existence, but are really quite relevant. And by the way, you'll see this on the yellow link down below. You'll— that's a link to my courses that teach this more in depth. So if what you learned today is intriguing to you, I invite you to click on the link and learn more about my online courses that will teach this material in much more depth. So what we're going to do is talk about families of all sorts of things, because in families is where a lot of problems begin. And learning how to listen people into existence is the antidote for dysfunctional problems that people are having in their relationships and in their families and in their work relationships. So I think you'll find this to be very informative. Uh, so in a moment, I am going to show you the process of how to listen another person into to existence, a 3-step process. Those of you that have seen my work before will be quite familiar with it. But before we do that, I want to lay out a little bit of theoretical work to help you understand why I think this is one of the most important skills that any of us can learn and master. So what parents believe about human life and human fulfillment governs their way of raising children. And you're going to learn that one of the biggest problems that we face in our society is not drug addiction or mental health or crime or political polarization. Climate change will probably rank as a pretty big, big, big issue, but the reason that climate change can't be addressed is because of something even more fundamental, and that's a concept known as emotional invalidation. And so I'm going to be talking for the next few minutes on that topic. Emotional invalidation is simply what happens when we deny people their feelings, their emotions. And there are fundamental, fundamental reasons why we emotionally invalidate, all originating with the family. So the first thing we want to understand is that what parents believe about human life and human fulfillment governs their way of raising children and The way children are parented forms their core beliefs about themselves. Children don't have a choice about their parents, and they don't have a choice about parenting styles. They basically are going to learn whatever it is their parents teach them. So let's start with traditional family values. There's a lot of talk about this over the years. It's been weaponized politically. For people who are adverse to change, saying we want to get back to traditional family values. I'm going to argue that traditional family values, as implemented unconsciously in families, leads to incredible emotional abuse and incredible dysfunction and is perpetrated for generation after generation. There are 4 basic family values that we talk about. The first one is obedience. Obedience basically says, in the traditional view, is that obedience to the patriarchy is paramount over anything else, and up until maybe 50, 70, 80 years ago, obedience was expected. Children were expected to obey their parents no matter whether their parents were right or wrong. And there was absolutely no room for critical thinking, for developing critical thinking in children, or having them develop their own moral judgments, or having their own inner freedom. There are many, many, many families expected their children to obey without question, and that obedience was— has been tyrannical, because obedience without critical judgment and inner freedom is abusive. But obedience is one of those traditional family values that people say is important, and it turns out that this is a poisonous, toxic value when it is improperly utilized or unconsciously utilized in a family to support a wounded father who's emotionally wounded from his parents, who demands instant obedience from the children, and that perpetuates— it populates from generation to generation to generation. The second traditional family value is orderliness, where everybody's supposed to be neat and tidy all the time, and messiness is not tolerated. Well, children are messy, I'm sorry to tell you that, but when you have, when you have children, you're in, you're in for 18 to 25 years of messiness. Kids spill stuff, they break stuff, they get dirty, they, you know, they're kids and they're messy. And when parents try to impose undue orderliness on children to not only deal with the physical messiness but also the messiness of emotions, they stifle creativity, and they invalidate their children's emotional growth. They stunt their emotional growth. So orderliness without spontaneity or the freedom to be oneself is oppressive and it's abusive and it creates extreme dysfunction in adulthood, and it's perpetrated again from generation to generation. The third family value is cleanliness. Well, yes, it's important that we be clean. I mean, there's no doubt about that. But cleanliness to the, uh, carried to an extreme where it's obsessive, uh, and without the messiness of creativity and imagination, again leads to internal emotional dysfunction and emotional invalidation and is, and it creates a lot of family dysfunction. And again, This is carried on for generation to generation because what children learn from their parents is what they do as parents themselves because they don't know any better. And the fourth traditional family value is the control of emotions and desires. I'm going to dive into this one deeply because the whole idea of listening other people into existence stems from the fact that the suppression of emotional expression, growth competency, and mastery that happens in all too many families is a huge cause of addiction, crime, and more morbidity later in life, as demonstrated by the Adverse Childhood Experiences study done by Kaiser Permanente Foundation out of San Diego, California. So children growing up in dysfunctional families are taught to inhibit the expression of emotion. And this is basically stuff like children are not to be— are to be seen, not heard. Children are not allowed to express anger or any negative emotion. If they can express any emotion at all, they can only be happy and joyous because we only want to be around happy, joyous kids. Children are told to behave themselves, and if they express any kind of emotion at all, they are oftentimes punished. And so they suffer from not being seen or heard. And children are emotionally invalidated. Think about this: you're 2 years old— remember when you were 2 years old and you were running around outside and you fell down and you skinned your knee and you started to cry. What were you told? Well, if you were a guy, you were a little boy, you were told something like, "Suck it up, buttercup. Rub dirt on it. It doesn't hurt. Stop crying. Don't be a sissy. Big boys don't cry." You're basically being told by the adults not to feel emotion. And that's emotionally invalidating. And if you're a girl, maybe you're told not to be a drama queen or to be a big girl or put on your big girl panties. Again, you're being told to stuff your emotions. The reason that this happens is because the parents can't deal with their own anxiety around the emotionality of their children. And so in order to soothe themselves they tell the children to stop being emotional, and they'll actually punish children for being emotional because it's too upsetting to the parent to be around an emotional child. So this is very selfish, very abusive, happens everywhere, and it's happened for generations. This is the concept of emotional invalidation. Um, so children grow up not having healthy models for naming and expressing their emotions. And is it any wonder by the time they get to their teen years and start to form attachments with other teens and maybe start to date, and then they get older and they, and they start dating more seriously and ultimately get married, that they have the same kind of emotional dysfunction that their parents had because they have never been taught how to be emotionally competent. They have been invalidated all their lives, and so all they know how to do is to invalidate the people around them, especially their partner. Most relationship fights are about nothing. They're about nothing. They're not about important stuff like sex or money or housing or anything like that. They're about nothing. And what's really being called for in these arguments is simply a desire to be heard and listened to, what we call listening others into existence. So children are also shamed or punished for expressing their emotions. They're being told they're bad when they feel a very normal anger or they feel a very normal embarrassment or they feel a very normal frustration. Instead of being allowed to express that emotion, in many families they are told not to feel at all. And so what do they do? They numb out, they become emotionally defensive, emotionally shut down, and they become emotionally isolated. And the problem is that parents really should be coaches, emotional coaches, and not emotional disciplinarians. But most parents don't get that because they were raised in this authoritarian model where instant obedience was expected and having emotions was bad or evil or irrational. So there are two prevalent family rules that tend to exist in, in many, many families that also play on this problem that we have. And that is the no-talk rule. And what that means is children are not allowed to express themselves. So you're sitting at the dinner table, it's okay for Dad to get angry, it is not okay for a child to get angry. If a child gets angry at the dinner table, that's considered disrespectful and the child gets sent off to his or her room. And there's no room for emotional growth or emotional competence or emotional competency. Children are expected to remain silent and to have not, not display any emotions whatsoever and to basically be invisible. And this is called the no-talk rule, and it's implicit in many, many families. The second rule is called the no-listen rule, and this is a rule that sort of evolves when children get a little older they're preteens or teenagers. And what happens is, because by now everybody is emotionally defended, they are defending themselves with sarcasm or making fun of people, making fun of their siblings or picking on people. And they are talking over each other because the only way you can defend yourself against emotional harm is to talk louder and faster and be more sarcastic, be meaner than anybody else at the dinner table. And as a result, nobody learns how to listen to anybody else. And as a result of this, when kids move into adulthood, they have no clue how to listen. They can hear words, but they don't know how to listen people into existence. They don't have a clue about that. And so if we, if you're good parents, you're going to model these kinds of behaviors: how to be authentic, not a caricature or stereotype, how to relate intimately with another person appropriately, how to acknowledge and express emotions, how to have physical, emotional, and intellectual boundaries, how to communicate, and how to be resilient in the face of life's challenges. These are the attributes of good parenting, which we don't see very much. And how to love— if you can't see that because it's behind the screen— but how to love oneself and others. So you've got to learn how to express and model love, which is not done in family. We talk about families as being loving places, but for the most part, there's very little love. There's some affection occasionally, but very little true love being modeled by parents to their children. So shame-based parents can't do any of this. If they grew up in shame and they grew up in these traditional family values where, where they were shamed as a means of social control, they can't model any of these good parental models. And as a result, their children never feel listened or heard, and they end up being defended or emotionally withdrawn or emotionally numb, uh, and emotionally unavailable. And maybe this is something you've experienced yourself, or maybe it's something you've experienced with somebody you've been in a relationship with, that they're numb, they are emotionally withdrawn, they can't talk about emotions, they don't want to talk about emotions, emotions make them nervous or anxious, and they are— they can't even begin to talk about their feelings. And that's because they were raised by shame base parents who couldn't do this either. It's not their fault, but it's, but it's, it's a critical problem and it's reached a critical mass. So how bad is it? Well, I've done some research and what I've learned is that defunction is such the norm in many families, it's often hard for people to recognize what a healthy relationship is. They don't— they would know a healthy relationship if it hit him in the face because dysfunctional is normal. And in fact, I've seen numbers as low as 60 to 65% of all families are dysfunctional, to Virginia Satir, who was a family systems theorist in the 1970s and '80s, who claims that 96% of all families are dysfunctional. That 96% was once attributed to John Bradshaw, Turns out he didn't make that statement at all. I did the research. It was made by Virginia Satir. So this is a huge range of dysfunction. And even if you took the lower number, 60%, that means that 60% of the children that are growing up are emotionally dysfunctional. And when they come into adulthood, they're going to push that, their dysfunction into the next generation because they don't know any better. And this is why listening others into existence becomes so powerful a concept. So the effect on normal adults— and by normal with the quotation mark, I mean there's no biological problem in the brain that's causing some kind of mental issue like schizophrenia, for example, or bipolar, which are biologically based disorders. So these are normally functioning people, well, normally formed people, but the effect of this dysfunction on them is the same thing as the children. They become emotionally shut down. They become anxious around strong emotions. They are emotionally unavailable, and they can't and won't talk about emotions. This is so common. If you're listening live, I mean, tell me your experience. Does any of this stuff resonate with you? Are these experiences that you've seen? I can tell you for myself as a mediator and peacemaker that this is what drives most human conflict. So go ahead, put in the chat box, just say, yeah, this is common. Yes, I've seen this. Yes, this resonates with me. If it really does resonate with you. And of course, people numb out, and they numb out in all kinds of ways. Numb out just not by not only not feeling anything, but they become addicted. They go into addictive behaviors. So it, it might be drug addiction, it might be alcohol addiction, but it can be workaholism, it can be over-exercising, it could be binge-watching television. It could be, uh, it could be any kind of behavior that is unconsciously engaging to fill the hole that people feel within them, this hole that has been created during childhood because they were emotionally invalidated or they were shamed. And so people, people, uh, people people do stuff to try to feel and fill up that pain that they experience. And so they numb out, they become addicted. And of course, because they don't know any better, if they become parents, they're going to pass this on to their children. And this is the numbing out, addictive behaviors that we see so much of. It's emotionally based, caused by these tyrannical family values that so many people think are so great that are really awful and abusive. And it causes people to be, uh, ultimately emotionally invalidated. So people that come out of these kinds of dysfunctional families are often— their behavior is shame-based. They feel shame all the time. Sometimes they hide it pretty well. But underneath they feel like they're flawed and defective. They have very low self-worth, and their, and their behaviors manifest in, in ways that we've seen before. They become pleasers, or they become narcissists, or they become authoritarian, or they become overachievers, or they suffer from imposter syndrome. The list goes on and on and on of how all of this childhood abuse is deflected and directed in adulthood to try to erase the pain of the emotional invalidation. It's prevalent everywhere. And the upshot is many, many, many people feel excruciatingly lonely. They can't connect with other people, and what they want more than anything else is connection, but they can't get it. Because they don't know how, because they were never taught how, because their parents experienced excruciating loneliness in their marriages and relationships. Yes, they remained married, and from the outside it looked like the perfect marriage, but there was a distance, an emotional distance between the parents, and they weren't able to experience intimacy. They sort of were at a Cold War level of peace with each other and didn't get divorced for the sake of the parent or for the sake of the children and/or, you know, because of the financial implications. And this is very, very, very common. So let me talk about the gift of listening another into existence. So we have all of these people out in the world, 60 to 96%, depending upon what number you pick for the number of dysfunctional families there are, and they are, they have, they are numb, they're unavailable, they're defensive, they're afraid of emotions, and they are completely shut down. The greatest gift you can give that costs you absolutely nothing to give is to listen them into existence by validating their emotional experience. They're not capable of validating their own emotions, but you are capable of validating those emotions. And when you validate those emotions in a simple little 3-step process that I'm going to show you in a minute, everything changes. I'll just, I, one of the things that I do in my life is I'm a co-founder of the Prisoner Peace Project. And with my co-founder Laurel Kaufer and I, or with my co-founder Laurel Kaufer, For the last 10 years, we have worked in maximum security prisons training murderers and lifers to be peacemakers. So before the pandemic— of course, pandemic shut down the project until we get clean again— but before the pandemic, I was working in Corcoran State Prison here in California, which is one of our maximum security prisons. I was working in the Level 4 facility, which is where the worst of the worst are, and in fact, I was teaching 100 feet from Charles Manson's Sell. And I was working with men who are coming out of gangs, all of them having extremely violent pasts. And I taught them how to listen each other into existence. And one day I came into class and one of the guys had a story to tell. And he said, 'I just want to share with you what happened.' I said, 'I was— a couple of weeks ago I was on a phone call with my family and I was talking to my 7-year-old daughter and all of a sudden dawned on me that I had never listened to her before. So I started listening to her emotions and reflecting back her emotions. I began to listen to her into existence. And on a later call with my wife, my wife reported that my daughter said, Mommy, Mommy, I want my own phone call with Daddy every week, all by myself, nobody else.. And so that's what they did. And he said, I used to always talk all about myself and I'd sort of drift off when my 7-year-old was talking to me and I really never understood it. But when I started listening to her emotions, everything changed. And all of a sudden I realized what a deep, complex little being she was and how nobody at home was really supporting her. And I learned that I could do more in a 15-minute conversation over the phone, listening her into existence, and helping her navigate life even though I'm locked up here behind bars than anybody who was with her in the outside world. And then he started to cry. I'll tell you one other story and then we'll get into how to do this. So early on in the Prisoner Peace Project, Laurel and I were working. We started the project in the largest, most violent women's prison in the world, which was at that time Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla, California. And we came out of the room one day and there was one of our students was there early, but she was in a chair sort of over in the corner of this dingy conference room. Prisons are not nice places to teach, by the way, pleasant. The physical environment is not very pleasant, as you might imagine, and she was crying, quietly sobbing. So Laurel walked over and knelt next to her and said, "What's going on?" And she told us the story, and the story she said was that when 18 years ago She was an alcoholic and had gotten drunk and was driving on a highway and killed a family of four. And at the time, she had a son who was 3 years old. She was sentenced to 20 years to life for, um, intentional vehicular manslaughter, and she had to give up her son to her sister to raise. And every week she wrote to her son, and even when her son could start to read and could write back. She never heard a word from her son. All the reports she got from her son were coming from her mother. Then we taught her how to listen to others into existence, and she told us that she decided to write a different letter to her son, listening him into existence. And the reason that she was sobbing was because for the first time in 18 years, she got a letter back from her son. And she said, you know, the letter was very angry, and he had every right to be angry with me because I abandoned him essentially from my own selfishness, my own addiction. But he said, what, what is amazing is the end of the letter by saying, Mom, I'm going to come visit you with my girlfriend, and I love you. And Laurel and I just sort of looked at each other in stunned silence, and for the first time really understood the power of what it means to listen other people into existence. So our emotions are the core of our basic power. We are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. And anybody who goes into this rationality bias is absolutely ignorant of what's going on in science these days. Emotions monitor our basic needs. Without emotions, we wouldn't even know to eat or to drink or to do anything else in the world. It's emotions that make us pay attention to our environment. It's emotions that allow us to make decisions. It's emotions that allow us to be rational. It's emotions that allow us to communicate. Without emotions, we're nothing. We're nothing. It's emotions that make us human, and it's emotions that move us to act. This is all based on neuroscience. It's all new science. So the teachings of Philosophers and theologians for the last 4,000 years that emotions are bad and evil or irrational, and that to be human is to be rational, all wrong, deadly wrong. The science has proven them all to be wrong. But we have this rationalistic bias that exists in our society that causes us to shame emotion. It's bad to feel emotion. It's weak. It's touchy-feely. It's soft. It's not manly, manly. It's not business. It's not hardcore enough. Well, guess what? All of those attitudes are abusive and wrong. When you learn how to master your emotions and you learn how to listen others into existence, you have a superpower that nobody can stop. It's one of the most amazing transformations that anybody can ever experience. And I have personally observed thousands and thousands of transformations of people who've learned how to listen other people into existence. So you, at the bottom there, you'll see that link, DougNoll.com/LP/listenothersintoexistence. That's an online course I have. It's not very expensive. It's an online course I have. I am so passionate about this that I put together an advanced, a basic and advanced course, on how to do this, because this I believe is the secret to a happy, fulfilling life. And if enough people are doing this, it's the secret to peace. Earlier I'd say we'd cover how to do this, and I want to explain to you, I'm not going to leave you hanging and tell you that you got to go buy the course in order to learn how to do this. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to tell you exactly how to do it. But it's easy to talk about, it takes a little bit of practice, in order to implement it, but it's not difficult. Anybody can do it. So here's how we listen other people into existence. Take notes. It's a 3-step process. This is counterintuitive and it's also counter-normative. It's going to go against everything that you think you know about listening, and it's going to violate some rules that you think you know about talking and speaking in conversation, but I'll explain all of that. They don't, and it isn't, but it seems weird in the beginning. Your first step is to ignore the words of the person that you're listening to. You're not going to ignore the person, but you are going to ignore their words. The word— we have been taught to listen to words and ignore everything else. In listening others into existence, you're going to do exactly the opposite. You're going to ignore the words so that you can start listening to the emotions. And in the second step, you're going to listen to those emotions. And you say, well, how do I do that? I don't even, I'm not even emotionally self-aware myself. How can I possibly accurately listen to somebody else's emotions? Well, here's the thing that's really, really cool. Our brains are hardwired to listen to emotions. You know, as human beings, we've only had vocabulary for, or language, for less than 230,000 years, just an eye blink in the evolution of our species. And before our brains evolved and the pharyngeal nerves and muscles in our necks evolved as a result of the discovery of fire, which allowed us to start eating fatty foods and give us more calories, until that happened, hominids, our predecessors, communicated nonverbally. And we became very adept, our predecessors became very adept at reading each other's emotions. And we still have that capacity today, but because of the bias of rationality and the myth that's been perpetrated on us for thousands and thousands of years that we're rational beings and to ignore emotions, this innate ability we have to read other people's emotions has gone ignored. It's dormant. But it takes nothing to activate it. All you have to do is ignore the words of the person that you're listening to and just be silent and let the emotions flow into you. You will either feel them or they will come into your consciousness. And as soon as you start sensing those emotions of the other person, then you're going to do the third step. Which is reflect back the emotions with a simple "you" statement. You're going to say something like, "You're really angry. You're frustrated. You feel completely disrespected. You don't feel appreciated. You're not being heard. You're ignored. You feel like you're being treated unfairly. You feel sad. You're anxious. You're scared." You feel embarrassed. You feel a little bit of shame. Oh, you're feeling a lot of grief and sadness. You feel abandoned. You feel like nobody loves you. You're completely all alone. Now, as I said that, how did you all feel? What experiences Did that all resonate with you? And that's— those are— that list of emotions that I just gave you is all you really need in order to reflect back the emotions with the you statement. So put in, do you feel anything as I was talking about that? Did it— do you feel the resonance inside your body? Most people will say, yeah, I really— even though Doug is doing this over Facebook Live or YouTube, it's still touched me. And it does, because it's going right to our brains. There's our brain scanning studies that show that affect labeling as a mode of what is technically called implicit emotional regulation inhibits the emotional centers of the brain at the same time that it activates the prefrontal cortex. And I don't have time in this short talk to go into all the science behind this. But let me just say there's hard neuroscience around why and how this works. So that when you reflect back the emotions with the you statement, you are literally lending your prefrontal cortex to the other person for the 30 to 45 to 90 seconds it takes for their brain to come back online so they can start thinking again. And you literally listen them into existence. And the thing that is so cool is that not only can you calm people down and soothe them, but as you listen them into existence, they will express deep gratitude to you for doing that, because most people have never had the experience of being deeply validated. And this is the gift you can give to anybody. You can give it to your little children. If you've got small children, this is a really important tool. I was on a call earlier this morning with a company that I've been teaching this to, to this company, to their senior leadership management. And a couple of the men on the call have 5-year-old boys. And they each described how they were labeling the emotions of their 5-year-olds. And they said in 3 weeks, because the workshop that I taught, live workshop with— that's the first live workshop I've done in 2 years. The live workshop I taught them 3 weeks ago, they said in 3 weeks, I've been affect labeling him and his behavior has completely changed. Now he is managing his own emotions, he's affect labeling himself, he's labeling my emotions and his mother's emotions, and he is much more calm and much more present with himself than I've ever seen before. And this is completely consistent with what the brain scanning studies have been showing about the power of listening others into existence. So the 3 steps are: ignore the words. Step 2, listen to the emotions. Step 3, reflect back the emotions with "you" statement. "You are sad." 2 things not to do: don't use an "I" statement. Don't say something like, 'Oh, what I think you're feeling is sadness.' That is all pop psychology. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. It was— that's the active listening that was coined by psychologist Thomas Gordon in the 1960s. No science to support any of that work. Same thing with nonviolent communication. Doesn't work. No science to support it. Never has worked. Marshall Rosenberg, in my opinion, stole, stole the material from Thomas Gordon. They were all PhD students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That's where Carl Rogers, the famous humanist psychologist of the 20th century, was based. He taught Gordon, uh, and I— and, and 20 years later Rosenberg showed up and got his PhD there. And you can just see the evolution from Rogers to Gordon to Rosenberg. They were all wrong. And here's the proof of that. If they were right and their active listening techniques or nonviolent communication are now called compassionate communication, if that all worked, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. I wouldn't be wasting my time or your time trying to explain to you the power of listening other people into existence because it would've already been done and people would've already been using it. But if you've taken any active listening classes, of any kind, you know as well as I do that it doesn't work, especially with upset emotional people. All it does is make things worse. So please, please, please avoid using I statements. The reason that we use I statements is because it's self-soothing. We're soothing our own anxiety because we're anxious about somebody else's emotions, so we make it about ourselves, not about them. The second thing to avoid doing when you're listening other people into existence is to ask them a question like, how are you feeling? Are you angry? How are you feeling? Here's the thing. They're upset and emotional because they don't know how they're feeling. They're in a condition called alexithymia, the inability to articulate or specify their own emotions. And when you ask them how they're feeling, you're asking them a question they can't answer. And so they become even more frustrated and more angry. And you've seen this time and time again. You ask somebody how they're feeling and they say, get out of here. I don't know how I'm feeling, leave me alone, right? Happens a lot. And the reason is you're frustrating them by asking them a question they can't answer. So don't ask questions, don't use an I statement, keep it really simple. You are angry, you're afraid, you're scared, you're anxious, you feel disrespected, you don't feel loved, you feel lonely and abandoned. That's it. Now, how do you go about practicing this? Best way to practice it in the beginning is on strangers. So go to Starbucks, and when you're giving your credit card to the barista, say, 'Hey, you look really happy today,' and watch what happens. It's amazing. Or maybe you're going out to a restaurant. If you want to get the very best restaurant service you've ever had in your life, most servers today are pretty frustrated, they're tired because there just aren't enough workers and so they're overworked. Just look at your server and say, you look really frustrated and tired, and just say that. And they'll go off, they'll start to— yeah, I'm doing double shifts and this is really crappy and I hate this job, and you know, whatever it is. So yeah, you're really frustrated, you're really tired, and you're kind of angry, and you feel betrayed by your co-workers. Yeah, that's all you need to say, and you'll get the best restaurant service you ever had, because you listened that person into existence just for the 20 or 30 seconds. That's all it takes. So that's what I mean by listening others into existence. If you want to learn more, go to my website, DougNoll.com. Lots of articles that describe this in all kinds of scenarios. Course is on the screen there, DougNoll.com/LP/listenothersintoexistence. Buy the course, it's bundled, so they're both the basic and the advanced course. I suggest that you do it with a friend, a partner, spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend. Do it together. That way you get a 2-for-1, right? I don't care how many people watch the videos. I'm here to teach, not to make money. So Take the course, courses, there are two of them. There are a huge amount more to learn other than what I've talked about today, but I've basically given you the broad outline of why we have to listen to other people into existence, because we have so many dysfunctional families which produce dysfunctional adults, which produces a lot of misery and unhappiness, and how we listen other people into existence by ignoring the words, listening to the emotions, and reflecting the emotions back with the "you" statement. So let me know whether this idea works for you. You can put your comments or likes or whatever you got in wherever you are, however you're watching this, in the comment section. And you can always email me at Doug@dougnoll.com with your comments, and I will respond to all of those. Um, if you like this video, you can subscribe to my channels, and so you can be notified of my upcoming presentations. Generally, I'm doing this every Thursday at 11 AM Pacific. I'm always covering the same basic topic, but I'll cover it in different ways with different applications and different ways of using it. So you can attend these and learn quite a bit from me over the course of between now and the end of the year. And finally, in the next video, I'm going to talk about why you can't learn emotional intelligence. There are over 250 companies online that I've been able to find that claim that they can teach you emotional intelligence. It's all BS. It's all a game to get your money. And next week I'll explain why that is and what you should be learning instead of emotional intelligence. So until then, Listen other people into existence. Give them the most precious gift you can give and watch how it transforms lives.