Change starts when you listen to the things you hear

Listening and hearing are two different things. We hear all kinds of things every day and the role of hearing is to ensure our safety. It’s one of the senses we use to navigate the environment we live in and to make sure there’s no danger around. On the other hand, listening is about understanding what we hear.

Imagine you are in a foreign country and you are moving towards your accommodation. You just left the restaurant where you had dinner with your friends and, because your flight is early in the morning, you decide to leave earlier than everybody else.

Therefore, you leave the restaurant and walk towards the accommodation. It’s almost 23:00 and you hope to get at least a few hours of sleep. It takes you around 20 minutes to get back to the accommodation and, on your way there, you keep thinking about tomorrow.

100 meters before the accommodation building, you pass a garden with beautiful flowers and small trees. All of a sudden, you hear a noise and you don’t know what it is. Because of that, you take a few steps back from the garden, stop, and listen.

When you listen, your senses become more active because you try to understand if that noise endangers your safety or not.

Moving on from this story and going back to the article, I’d like to make you aware of a few more things that you could listen to so you can understand them:

• A friend, to get a better grasp of what they’re going through
• Your employer, to better understand your responsibilities at work
• Your life partner, to understand their needs

But there’s something deeper that you can listen to so you can create change in your life, and those are your thoughts.

Change starts when you can listen to your thoughts

I talk about those thoughts that you don’t set yourself to have and appear in your mind out of nowhere, spontaneously. Those thoughts that are suggested to you by your ego and seem to come out of nowhere. They are not your thoughts because you never set yourself to have them. But it’s your responsibility to listen to them.

We all have these thoughts. We all have thoughts that appear spontaneously in our minds, good or bad, and they influence our lives.

Change starts when you pay attention to these thoughts and don’t give them the chance to take over your thinking.

These thoughts appear all the time. They appear when you walk down the street, when you wait in line to buy food, when you are in the chair of your barber shop, when you run, when you meditate, before you go to sleep, when you prepare for a presentation in front of your boss, and so on.

These thoughts appear all the time.

And because they are thoughts you don’t set yourself to have, it’s your responsibility to be aware of them and listen so you can understand them.

Let’s say you are out shopping and you get ready to pay for whatever you bought. But you see a queue of 10 people, so you have the following thoughts, in this order:

• Too many people in line
• I shouldn’t have come to the store
• You’ll be late for work
• The boss will be mad at me
• The customer will be upset that I didn’t respond to his emails sooner
• I’m going to have a bad day
• I can’t wait for the day to end
• The boss will be mad at me
• I’ll tell him I was at the store and there was a line for nothing
• Nobody will care
• Nobody cares about me
• You’ll be late for work
• I can’t wait to get home tonight
• If nobody cares about me, why am I still struggling?

And these thoughts could go on. While the first two or three thoughts make sense, exactly the same thoughts escalated your thinking to thoughts related to nobody cares about you, which isn’t true.

When you listen to the thoughts that appear out of nowhere in your mind, you can identify them and stop, so you don’t give them the chance to take over your mind.

The hidden gem behind selective listening

Imagine the following conversation with a friend.

Your friend: I saw you yesterday in the park and I wanted to say hi, but you were too far away and I was in a rush.

You: Yes, I was in the park yesterday. I had to quickly deliver something to someone.

In this hypothetical situation, you didn’t even hear that your friend wanted to say hi. More than that, you heard the word ‘rush’ and used that word to tell your friend that you had to get somewhere fast.

What you told your friend had nothing to do with what they said to you and your answer could have been a reply to… anything else.

In this situation, when you are present and pay attention to your response, you have the chance to discover at yourself things that could help you change your life. That’s where change starts.

Considering that your answer seems more like a hesitant reply, maybe you wanted your friend not to notice you on that day. And if that’s the case, why didn’t you want your friend to notice you?

Change starts when you can listen to the things you hear and continues when you pay attention to the selection you make in regards to the things you hear. Especially, the things you hear yourself say.

With love and optimism,
David