Unlocking the Power of Listening: The Key to Understanding and Harmony

20 Jul 2024 · 3 min

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2:49

Julian Treasure (speaking in a YouTube talk) argues that listening is essential for civil society: without listening we risk siloed mentalities, polarization, caricature, and violence. He identifies "validation" as a crucial practice—acknowledging why someone believes what they do—as central to understanding across differences. Treasure notes that listening is unique to each person, shaped by filters such as language, culture, upbringing, expectations, intentions, and emotions, and offers practical observations (e.g., listening can defuse someone who is upset). He references a previous TEDx talk, "The Sound of Democracy," to underscore listening’s civic role.

Chapters

If you're not listening to people and you're not understanding people, especially people with different views, then you're in danger of getting into this kind of siloed mentality that we see more and more polarized politics, caricaturing people, demonizing people. And down that slippery slope, you know, you then get into violence. You get into, you know, the kind of ISIS view of the world which is, disagree with me and I'll kill you. That's a dangerous, dangerous slope. I gave a talk, a TEDx talk, years ago in Athens, the cradle of democracy called the Sound of Democracy. And I said, the Sound of democracy is listening. Because only by listening and understanding somebody can we live next to somebody with whom we fundamentally disagree. And in fact, my work has moved very much to focus on this particular hotspot. There's a word which I think is the most important word in modern civil society, and we don't see enough of it. That word is validation. Validation. TJ I don't agree with what you just said. I completely disagree with you. But I can see why you believe that. It makes sense that you would say that given your different life experience compared to mine. You know, one of the powerful things I teach in my course, in my book, and in my coaching and training and workshops is that listening is unique. Every human being's listening is as unique as their fingerprints, their voice print, or their irises. That's because we listen through a set of filters, and those filters arise as we grow and develop in our lives. And, you know, you and I have come different roads to this moment here today, where we're together and we will have picked up different filters, we'll have different perhaps. I mean, the language we speak is roughly the same, although not entirely the same. The culture we were born into, probably quite different. And the values, attitudes, and beliefs we picked up along the way. You will have picked up yours and I mine from teachers and parents and friends and role models and so forth. And then in any given situation, we have expectations, intentions. Well, ours are probably very aligned at this moment, but that's not always the case. We might have emotions going on. You know, just think of how well you listen when you've had terrible news or fantastic news. Not very well. How well can we listen when we're upset? Not very well. And by the way, a great tip for defusing somebody who's upset is to listen to them, and the steam will start to evaporate and they'll calm down. So all of that means that our listening is unique, and that is One of the most common errors that I see in the world is the assumption that everybody listens like I do.