24 Jun 2025 · 5 min
Dr. Ed Tori explains how your internal state shapes what you hear and how you connect with others. When you listen from judgment versus curiosity, or stress versus compassion, you pick up entirely different things. Your emotional filters determine the relationship.
This is Dr. Torrey. Welcome to the Influence Every Day show, where we make every day better and we influence for good.
What's really interesting, how a single word can really change the meaning of a sentence or even the entire context of a gathering or a meeting. It's really interesting because if you just switch one preposition, one preposition, that's it. You switch one preposition when we talk about listening, and you change the entire experience. Let me explain. We often talk about listening to someone else, listening to something, listening to a conversation, listening to a person, listening to a friend, listen to a loved one, listening to a talk. But how often do we consider where we are listening from? In other words, if you just switch that preposition for a moment, it shifts from where the focus is external on the source of whatever you're listening to versus when you turn it internal, it actually starts to shed light on some lenses or frames or filters that we have. And so if we say, where am I listening from? Then it might reflect our state, it might reflect the frame, it might reflect our patterns of thought, it might reflect our context, like what's going on in our life. So there's a big difference between what said and how it lands, or what's said and how it is received. There's a big difference. And that difference is where you're listening from. That difference is that filter. So are you listening from judgment? If you're listening from judgment, then, well, you're not really receiving. You're evaluating. You're evaluating. If you're listening from curiosity, then there's not a rush to respond. There's an openness to a possibility. There's a much broader array of futures that could come of listening from curiosity. What if you're listening from stress? If you're listening from stress, you're amped up. And if you're amped up, something that somebody says that might be neutral might sound threatening. If you're listening from ego, you're filtering for status and control and comparison. And what does it mean about you? Right. What does this mean for me is the frame that we're in when we're listening from ego. What if we're listening from compassion? If we're listening from compassion, we don't just respond to what is said, we respond to what they're feeling. If we listen from fear, we're listening fear for danger. We're expecting it, we're anticipating it. It's going to be confirmed. If we're listening from obligation, like, hey, I have to be here. This thing's mandatory. Well, you're not. You wouldn't choose to be there otherwise. That affects how you. How it lands. That affects how it feels. That affects what you do with it. There are so many other possibilities that we could talk about. When you're listening from service, when you're listening from love and gratitude, when you're listening from all of these different states or experiences or emotions, it changes. There's a saying among. I'm going to say it. The younger generation. My daughter one time said to me, bruh, that hits different. First of all, I'm not your bruh. Second, it hits differently. But let's just take that phrase for a second. Bruh. It hits different. Yeah, it hits different. You know why? Because you showed up different. What someone says will hit different if you show up different. So how are you showing up? How are you showing up to that email? How are you showing up to that conversation, that meeting? How are you showing up to walking into your house and greeting your family or your loved ones? How are you showing up your first step into work or the first time you log into a virtual meeting? You change how you show up and you'll change what you hear, even if they don't even change a word. I'll see you in the next episode.
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