One Word: Listen

I’m a talker, no introvert me, no lean-in necessary; I have no dearth of verbiage, so when I consider what one word will serve as a reminder to myself at the beginning of 2022, LISTEN speaks. I know it will be a challenge to cultivate better listening, but I am all-too-aware of how I need to work on this aspect of my personality.

After a few weeks, the word LISTEN floats in the back of my mind, it accompanies me, and I am actually tempering my natural inclination to chime in. On a Sunday morning, I open the weekly email from a blogger I’ve been following for quite some time. Maybe you know him? Ian O’Byrne publishes the weekly “Digitally Literate” newsletter. It’s an eclectic assortment of his digital (and other) encounters during the prior week, and he is always enlightening.

Last Sunday among his offerings is a “Watch on YouTube: What you discover when you really listen.” O’Byrne introduces me to a TED Talk by Hrishikesh Hirway. I watch—and LISTEN—spellbound, for 15 minutes. The anecdotes and insights about his listening resonate. So there are at least two of us working to listen better! While his talk is peppered with wisdom, and I do not even think about interrupting because…it’s a TED Talk, after all, I finally understand exactly what I am doing when I think I’m being engaged with another.

In a enthralling presentation, with a voice both soothing and compelling, Hirway, a musician and creator of the podcast and Netflix series “Song Exploder,” explains how his desire to actually understand the layers of the musician’s song creation evolved into something much deeper.

During the many interviews he conducted with notable musicians, he says that he realized there were other doors to be opened in their conversations and “…I started to wonder: Could I try listening to people the way I was listening to music? Because when someone tells you something, just like with a song, there can be all these layers within it.”

Too many jewels shine as I listen to this TED Talk again, but the crown of them all is his epiphany that you can’t turn the conversation toward yourself; you can’t make it about you in the guise of relating to another’s story. The infamous, “That reminds me of something that happened to me…” becomes the gateway to self rather than the door to understanding another. He says, “But it’s kind of like listening to half a song, then saying, ‘Oh, this part reminds me of another song’ and then turning that song off and going to put on another song.”

With these words, I pause the video, and think. This is my epiphany and where I will change my practice, a strategy I can apply toward my resolve to LISTEN better.

The best thing about one word? I can easily hear it.