Susan Piver "Mindful Communication: The Art of Being Heard"

This is an amazing conference. I have been blown away by all of you and by what I've been hearing has been quite shocking, actually. People are talking about generosity, bravery from Seth yesterday and about the importance of reflection and rest and inwardness from the talk this morning. And those are things you don't usually hear in a business conference. And these are all also synonyms for mindfulness, which is our topic. These things are impossible, actually, without mindfulness. I mean, you can be intuitive and you can relax and you can sort of so forth and so on without mindfulness. But it'll just be because you're getting lucky with mindfulness. You can do it on purpose. So I'm excited to share some thoughts with you about mindfulness. But first, I want to tell you a story that involves not this flower, but I thought it was really pretty, so I thought, I'll put it up. So I live here in Boston, and I don't know if any of you have noticed. Maybe you live here and you know this or you have had to drive here and you've noticed this, but people here are very aggressive, and they are especially aggressive on the road. And I am one of those people. I'm not proud of it, but I've been a Buddhist practitioner for close to 20 years. I am a meditation teacher. I've written books about it and blah, blah, blah. But all of that goes to pot when I get behind the wheel. So my special pet peeve is rotaries or traffic circles. Can I get some, please? Thank you. I'm like, the person in the rotary has the right of way. And if you don't know that, mark me. So every time I approach a rotary, I'm like, who's going to F with me? Who's not going to know the rules of the rotary? Is it you? Is it you? Because bring it. So one morning. It's so stupid. One morning I'm out driving, going to the supermarket, Whole Foods, and it's like Saturday at 9am and I'm approaching the rotary. Nobody. This could work out this time. I get in the rotary, I look around, I'm like, this is good. This is good. Boom. This Buick comes out of nowhere and just cuts me off and I have to veer to the other lane and I just lose it. I lose it. I start honking at them and giving them the finger, and I get right up on their tail and I'm just gone insane. And they pull into the parking lot. I pull in right behind them. Happened to be the parking lot of Whole Foods. And I'M like, these are my people. You cannot f with me in the parking lot of Whole Foods. I pull up right beside her, or I pull up right beside the car, I should say, because I don't know who's in there. And I point at the person and I go, you put down your window. What am I going to say? I have no idea. The window goes down. I look in the car, and there's a woman who appears to be from another country, and she is terrified. And in the back of the car is her baby, who is crazy crying. And I look at them. I'm like, I did this to you. I look at her, and I'm about to go, but suddenly everything just drops. And I go, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. And she very intelligently rolled her window up and drove away. But I have never forgotten that moment where it was the meeting of the eyes and the recollection of each other's humanity that caused this whole crazy trip to just dissolve. I've heard a lot of talk in this conference about such moments and in your business life, in your professional life. Forget about your personal life. In your professional life, how often have you been me? How often have you been her? If we really want to create professional lives, companies, businesses that are based on caring, which is one of the most hopeful things that I'm gathering from this conference, is you people are creating a culture of caring that's big. That's really big. So it's one thing to say, however, I want to be human. I want to really connect with people in a genuine way. I want to build a company where people respect each other that is based on values and mission. I want to be generous. I want to be creative. That is fantastic. Please, please try to do those things. But then what? How. How do you do those things? Because it's one thing to get in the car and say, I'm going to drive to the supermarket. And it's another thing to get blindsided by someone, and that changes everything. And in your professional life, whether you work alone or you work with thousands of people, you're going to get blindsided all the time. It's easy to be mindful when things people are saying they love you or, that was awesome. You did a great job. What about when someone says, I hate what you just did, or you failed or you disappointed me? Where does your mindfulness go? So I want to describe what I think is the biggest threat to what you're attempting to do and the antidote to that threat. So it does not matter. These are going to be bold, blanket statements, so take it all with a grain of salt. It doesn't matter how smart you are, it doesn't matter how brilliant your idea is. It doesn't matter how many talented people you hire, and it doesn't matter how perfectly positioned your product or service is for the existing marketplace. Irrelevant. In my life, my working life, which has been long and varied, I've worked as a marketing executive, as a product development person, as a consultant on health and well being in companies, a writer, a Buddhist teacher, a blogger who has founded an online meditation community that's now got 10,000 people in it. Hell, I mean, I've been a waitress and a cab driver. Seriously. And in all those things, what causes failure, what causes difficulty, which sidetracks everyone is not. You're not talented enough or you said you brought these statistics to a meeting and they were wrong. If you start to unpack people's complaints about where they work. And again, this is from huge companies to being a taxi driver. If you peel away all of it, what you find that has caused the problem is so and so did not listen to me. So and so did not apologize to me. So and so did not notice that I was there. And so and so did not thank me for what I did. That's it. This is called relationships. And we are all working to create business environments that necessarily have to include our hearts. The final frontier in business, the only dirty word you could say in a business meeting up until about recently, is feelings. That's where it's at now. Contact with our hearts, respect for other people's hearts. The antidote to these problems of you didn't apologize to me, and so on, is mindful communication. I hate that phrase, by the way, opening your heart. So I'm going to break that down a little bit and I'm going to give you four tips for mindful communication. And then it will be Julian Mindful. By the way, there's a lot of talk about mindfulness, a lot of stats, a lot of focus on mindfulness, and I'm so happy to hear that. But mindfulness does not mean peaceful. It does not mean in control. It can certainly include those things. But what mindfulness really means is letting down your guard, opening to whatever situation you're in and to whomever you happen to be speaking to, letting down your guard and letting your world touch you. Because if you're not attuned to what's happening, if you're not letting what's happening touch you, odds are you are trapped in your hope for how things should go or your fear of how things may go. And that is not mindful. Mindful is taking. Is putting all your chips on red. Mindful is saying, whatever happens, I'm going to show up for it. And if I feel I'm going, if I am happy, I'm going to be completely happy. Completely confused and completely brilliant person that I am in every moment. So I just want to dispel any thought that mindfulness means peaceful. And then communication is so interesting because most communications are sequential monologues. I make my talk, you make your talk, and so on. But the space between us, the third, a third thing enters every communication. That is us. That's why it feels one way to tell your ideas to your mother and another way to tell your ideas to your boss. Because the space changes. You are the same, the ideas are the same, the space changes attunement to that space. Space is the source of skillfulness in conversation. Does that make sense? Are you with me? Does this sound like mindful, what you came to hear about? Basically. Okay, okay, so here are the. Here. As a Buddhist practitioner, these are ancient teachings, actually thousands of years old, but they're completely modern at the same time. I'm going to offer you four tips for mindful communication. And they may sound obvious, they may not. The first tip is called timing. Timing means knowing when to speak and knowing when to shut up. This is a highly underrated skill. Skill allowing the space choose to. To have timing in what you. What you want to say. You have to be super aware of the person or the room that you're. That you're with, the person you're talking to or the room that you're in. Timing. That's pretty obvious. The second one is called listening. And that may sound very cliche, but I, I used to have a boyfriend a long time ago named Mark Kreiser who identified the Kreiser syndrome, which was when you use the time that I am talking to think of what you are going to say next. And that is what most of us are doing in conversation. Listening means dropping that completely and literally giving yourself to the person that you are talking to, giving them your full attention, not holding back. That's actually quite scary. Listening is very brave. My favorite definition of listening is to cease thinking your thoughts and to start thinking my thoughts, because that's what you have to do to listen. The third is crazy. It's called agenda lessness. We all have an agenda when we're having a business communication. But in order to have that communication be genuine, you have to drop your agenda. The way to drop your agenda is to be curious. I'm speeding up a little bit because I only have a few more minutes. And the fourth is called confidence. We all know when we're listening to someone who is confident. And to have confidence is very simple. It doesn't mean you have to believe in yourself. It doesn't mean you have to think you are the best. It doesn't mean you have to be certain of what you know. Here is the way guaranteed to generate confidence. Are you ready? Place your attention on maximizing the other person's position. That is a position of power. Often when we're in business, we. We feel powerless, especially when we're trying to sell something or trying to get someone to buy something from us. We're asking for something and that can feel powerless because we're waiting for the yes or the no. But when you seek to maximize the other person's position, to thinking about them, give them what they need, you suddenly take the seat of power in whatever communication you're. So between these things, timing, listening, agenda, lessness and confidence, you will rouse this quality, the single quality that will get people to listen to you. And in our world, getting heard is getting everything and it is called genuineness. So in this sense, mindful listening has very little to do with what you say and has everything to do with who you are. So the way to cultivate these skills, I would like to posit is through the practice of meditation. And I'm not trying to sell you on meditation, but sort of I am. So if you would learn to meditate, that would be a very potent tool in your path to success. So I wish you all well in your businesses and in your lives. Thank you.