Silence

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Transcript

This is how I stopped many of my talks on stage with a black screen. And then I say, listen, that's the wonderful sound of a room full of people, consciously. Listening. Listening is so important. I've tried to explain several times already how listening underpins communication if you want to be heard, you need to be able to listen well. So here we're going to look at some exercises, which will help you to become a great conscious listener, and that will increase the power of your speaking.

Because if you listen well, people listen to you. Well, also listening has many side effects which are good for you. It increases your happiness, your effectiveness and your well being justice does speaking. So speaking and listening, intimately connected as we've seen in a circle with a context around them. Let's move on to discover ways in which you can practice the skill of listening, improve yourself and become a master of this incredibly important skill. Here's your first listening exercise.

Its silence. Now I could do an entire chapter on silence. Almost write a book. In fact, there are several great books on silence. I particularly like Sarah McClellan's book, and also George perhaps next book in search of silence, in pursuit of silence, I'm sorry. And I appeared in a wonderful film, which came out a couple of years ago called in pursuit of silence.

I do urge you to seek that out. It's, I think, available online now. And it's a marvelous film because silence is so rare around us these days. There are lots of different types of silence of course. And when you think about silence, it really does bear meditating on it, and really considering it in detail. What is silence?

Well, it is a sound, I think. But it's also the context for all sound. Without the valleys, you can't have the mountains without the gaps between the words, you have meaningless constant noise. Silence is what makes language and music intelligible and meaningful. It is a baseline. It's the only baseline there is for sound, really, and you need to return to that baseline from time to time in order to recalibrate your ears.

Constant exposure to noise deadens us and leaves us numb to the sound around us and less sensitive to its effect on us as human beings. Nevertheless, silence silence is quite hard to find these days. I know many people who actually find it threatening. Perhaps you live in a city, you're used to the Roar are the humble The, the gentle voice of the city cities have different voices. And once you become used to them they're reassuring. You may be one of those people who when you enter a room has to turn on some sound a TV or a sound system or something in order to populate the room with sound, finding absence of sound, somewhat oppressive.

Now, if that's you, I do urge you to renew your relationship with silence, it's important to have it and I'm going to give you a tool to do it here. This is a series of meditations, which I photographed as I walked around a path on the island of San Giuliana in Lake otter in northern Italy. It's a path around a convent, and they have every few hundred meters they have a sign with a meditation that you're supposed to walk the path in silence, and meditate on what you've seen, to get to the next one that I think there are 12 of them. And I'm going to present them to you now as slides in this presentation in complete silence so that you can Spiritually do that work. These are not religious, so much as spiritual. I know it's a Catholic monastery or convent, but they're very eclectic, I think and they're all worth considering.

Apart from anything else. The exercise of sitting in silence and focusing on these little aphorisms is very beneficial. Now, this starts you off because the practice I'm going to suggest to you is you get a little bit of silence every day. So if you haven't had some for a while, here's a good chunk of it. Enjoy Well, I think that's a lovely practice and I do encourage you to come back and do it as often as you feel you would like to daily if you wish. If you can't do that, and it's probably a big chunk to do.

Please try to start each day with two or three minutes of silence and create a couple of spaces of a couple of minutes in your day where you can go somewhere quiet. If you can't get complete silence then relative peace and quiet will do just fine. And nature sound of course can be perfectly pleasant. I'm really looking for peace and recalibration. If you can get complete silence though. That is great because it is your baseline it re energizes your ears like a sorbet and a meal recalibrates you And allows you to appreciate the effect of sound on you.

Again, recording engineers have to do this every so often, like every hour or so they have to go into a quiet space otherwise their ears go dead. With the music all day, you simply can't listen effectively without recalibration on a reasonably regular basis. It's also very good for you spiritually, I think, because as one of those meditations, said, I think in the silence you meet yourself, and that perhaps is why many people find silence, quite threatening. You can find and start to explore different kinds of silence in your life, the silence of going up high in the mountains above the treeline, when there's no wind or the silence of a deep cave, or all sorts of different silence at the silences of an empty Cathedral or mosque when there's nobody there. And there's a huge echoing space around you. Many, many different kinds of silence in the world worth exploring.

I encourage you to renew your relationship with silence

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