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Who is listening? Who is listening that you are unwilling or unable to move towards your dreams?
Warning: without the concept in this article, you can read 100 books, take 100 seminars, and they will not matter… chances are you have never heard about this concept.
In this article I am writing about a little known aspect of life… I couldn’t even find pictures for it… I will be using a gardening analogy,
What kind of soil are you?
- A seed that would grow best in acidic soil gets stunted or killed in alkaline soil.
- A seed that grows best in a loamy loose soil will suffocate in a dense soil with a lot of clay in it.
- Other soils will rot every seed you put in them…
You are that soil to any input. The seeds either grow in you and become full grown plants or die…
In this article I attempt to teach you that you can manage what kind of soil you are…
The path to overconfidence, often, is just some words you said or wrote… like it happened to me today.
Overconfidence makes you make mistakes that are often tragic.
I wrote that article on fear, and I was sharing my success in raising my TLB. I was speaking from the growth mindset but I was listening with the fixed mindset. That I have made it almost to the top… Luckily ‘life’ made me snap out of the fixed mindset, and had to pay only a relatively low price for the indulgence… just a pair of pants got ruined.
You see, every time I hear myself say something good about myself I run the chance to listen to it with the fixed mindset… Just watch the language and you will be able to hear whether someone speaks in the fixed mindset or in the growth mindset. And how it lands… whether you listen in fixed mindset will be up to you.
This is a lot like how affirmations trip people. An affirmation needs to be worded as if it is already true. Let’s say the affirmation is: ‘I am already on my way to becoming wealthy‘ You say it, and you can hear the mind saying: ‘You? Who are you kidding?‘ or something to that effect.
You can see in this example that the ‘you’ speaking is not the same as the ‘you’ listening.
- One speaks from the desire to make the affirmation true,
- the other listens from intending to invalidate it.
Why? Because the second you wants you to stay the same. The second you is the Opponent.
In the article I wrote about what it took to get to where I am… definitely not fixed mindset! But my second ‘you’ heard it with the fixed mindset, where I am something special… So you see, on any level of vibration it is possible to listen with the fixed mindset, no matter where the speaking came from.
Anyway, I heard that I was fabulous, I couldn’t lose, that I am a genius…
My immediate wake-up call indicated to me that that is what my listening ‘who’ heard.
The next thing that happened is I dropped my fried eggs first on my pants, and then on the floor… Some genius… eh? lol
There goes my superiority… good riddance.
This incident was a great example (ugh) for the two yous working at cross purposes, two trains passing each other in the night: the intended meaning spoken (here written) and the heard meaning.
- Was what I said wrong, or wrongly said?
- Is it that the listener lacks the knowledge, the thinking ability?
- Is it that the ego, the Opponent, has had too much investment in keeping you the same?
In this article I will be most interested in going under the hood, and look there…
After all, all my work, everything, is about what happens under the hood, hidden from plain view.
Really.
82% of the readers of this site don’t know that about me, about the site, or don’t know what it means.
That is unfortunate, but what about the remaining 18%?
The 82% are mostly the ones who send me disparaging comments and emails and energy attacks, attachments, etc….
18% are here to learn how to think, learn how to see, learn how to listen and speak, learn to live a life worth living.
This phenomenon, that you can hear what you say differently from how you meant it, or that you can hear differently what someone else says from how they meant it is what this article is about.
Who is speaking/who is listening.
OK, the two who’s. The speaker and the listener…
I once learned a useful series of questions to ask:
Who is speaking? Who is listening? What is speaking? What is listening?
We’ll work with the two who’s… Even thought the what’s are very interesting too. Let me know if you want another article on the what’s…
Now, in order to have this be useful you have to at least have an ACCURATE glimpse of who you are being…
Every conversation happens inside a field… another invisible part of the conversation. The field is the context.
So, for example, let’s say: I set the field to father-child.
The conversation between a father and a child, a professor and a student, an authority figure and you.
You can see that you can be, in that field: the father, the child, or refuse to be either. Just imagine being there. You have a typical way in any field… including father-child. You may have your typical way of being there: ‘I am a not a child’ and refuse to listen and be dominated.
The roles available in the father-child field are the father and the child, the not-father and the not-child. They are the WHAT…
The who you are is invisible to you, but it is there, nevertheless, operating under the hood. And the who you are is calling the shot, whether the conversation works, whether there is a desired result… or not. Whether the conversation is productive or not.
And 100% of the result comes from the listener… ‘the child’ in that conversation.
The hater
A person who argues with everything I say, laugh really loudly when I tell the truth about some nasty habits of mine, is probably a person who contests my knowledge, or my right to be father. Hater. Whether I earned it to be hated or not, who knows.
Whether the hater knows that they are being a hater or not is very important. In the four questions, the who they are that are listen (who is listening) is a hater. The what is listening is a student. But the who is the one who defines the end result… and the person can’t learn anything. The who needs to be made right.
Maybe they want to be the father. Maybe they want to be the ones with the knowledge, and the wisdom, they want what I have, without paying the piper. And maybe they are deeply resentful that I can and they can’t…
The motivation for hating is envy.
And they can’t hear anything other than that noise… because they are saying in their head… ‘she is wrong‘.
Then the resistors
And then there are the people who don’t want to be dominated and the who says, in their head: lalalalala… to drown out what I have to say.
My default ‘who’ is this: I know and you don’t: let me I tell you. And factually it is often true, but it’s condescending… proving my ‘superiority’ in the fixed mindset. And the inferiority of the other person… also in the fixed mindset.
It is always the listener’s ‘who’ that defines the conversation.
Said in another way: the power of the speaking comes from the listener. The listener’s ‘who’.
I’ve hoped that working on the ‘who is speaking’, the superiority is gone, and the new ‘who is speaking’ I can be there for the listener as someone who really speaks to make them a person, to give them what they want.
To modify the who is speaking. To modify the seed…
But, alas, the power resides with the listener, with the soil.
The past may get into your eyes… truth you got from your parents. Stuff you decided when you were a child. How your father treated you… and now you listen to me the same exact way.
Oftentimes you need to learn to clear your listening so you can hear what is there.
This is what we often call the familiarity that breeds contempt. Your friends, members of your family become fixed, and you already know what they are, who they are, and you despise them… or maybe even hate them. You can only hear what’s wrong with them, or what is proof that there is a lot wrong with them.
And they listen you the same way. From the past.
Or you meet someone and they have red hair. Or they are dressed sloppily. You ALREADY know they can’t say anything useful… You give them THAT listening. The ‘who’ listening is ‘You cannot possibly have anything useful to say. You are not like me. You have a different religion, a different skin color, a different style than what I consider respectable… So I may pretend I am listening, but I am really not.‘
If that is the ‘who is listening’ that you bring to this site, I can’t say anything useful… can I? It’s OK. Really. I am not here to change you.
What I really want to talk about, and who I really want to talk to are the people who are here to learn.
And there is, often, something blocking that, there is something in the way.
I am now talking to the people where ‘who is listening’ is ‘I really want to learn so I can become all I can be’.
One of the ‘something in the way’ of them learning from me is that they hear me with the fixed mindset…
I spoke from the growth mindset, and the echo, the fixed mindset in the listening hears that I can but they can’t… because…
Because they are slow, lazy, stupid, or don’t like math, don’t like reading, etc. Or don’t have the time. Or don’t have the energy… Every time there is an excuse why you can’t… you are in the fixed mindset, that says that you can’t become more, better, different, through practice and learning.
The fixed mindset is a Tree of Knowledge way of being in the world.
And it is promoted from every angle, on every social site, because misery loves company.
If you are one of the 18% who want to learn… read the Mindset book. We are still running the risk that you are going to read that book from the fixed mindset…
If you are one of the rare ones who are here to learn. And grow. And become an Expanding Human Being… Maybe a conversation can unstuck you from the fixed mindset.
Ask yourself: who is listening? Who is listening that I am not changing? Who is listening that I am unwilling or unable to move towards my dreams? Who is listening that fear is winning, that laziness is winning, that I am still only talking but not moving?
PS: I wrote this article six years ago. Nowadays I am doing a lot of healing work… and started to pay attention to the listening of the client… When they listen for what they really want… being healed, being whole and complete again… the healing works more than twice as fast as with clients who would rather fail me… unconsciously. The undeclared commitment.
Can you change your listening ‘who’? Yes, of course… but first you need to know what it is. Is it easy to see? Not really. It likes to hide, or masquerade as something else.
More often than not your payoffs in the racket will tell you…
