From Awareness Builder 101: Chapter 11

11. The Magic of Silence

 

When I think about why the universe changed the course of my life when coaching found me, one of the answers that keeps coming back is that I needed to learn a lot about myself. I also needed a lot more preparation to deal with what life still had in store for me.

Though coaching found me in my early forties, and I considered myself as a grown up man, it became very clear that I needed a big list of additional skills.

I must admit, I always thought I was pretty smart with words. Not often I didn’t know what to say and when I spoke, it was often smart and convincing. Even funny from time to time.

Now it feels that convincing was frequently actually overpowering, using smart words, sharp words, position or posture as tools to get it my way. I describe this as competitive communication where the aim is to win. Listening was actually analysing and measuring the others’ words to find out how I could use them for my personal gain. Listening was done through the filters of gaining and losing, right or wrong, enemy or friend.

Often the words never got much further than my brain, the place where logic lives.

 

Whilst being trained as a Co-Active coach, I learned about multiple ways to listen. A real breakthrough happened when I somehow realised why we have two ears and only one mouth. Guess why that would be…??? Maybe a simple conclusion could be that it might be a good idea to listen twice as much as that we speak. And since it feels I have some catching up to do here, I’m aiming for a different ratio. Even more listening and even less talking.

 

One place I discovered to be a very good environment to practice listening, is in nature. As often as possible I go into nature, preferably on my own, which makes it even easier to not speak…. With listening being the only option left, I started to listen to the silence. The sounds of silence. The gifts of silence. Have you ever been sitting in a forest very early in the morning or when it’s getting dark? That moment where the birds welcome the day or sing to say it goodbye and welcome the night. When you are so silent you can hear a roe deer approaching, a mouse between the leaves. Or even your own heartbeat.

 

This only becomes possible when you reach a state of silence, that you start listening with your soul. And a deep, intimate way of communication opens up when we start listening this way to other people. When we allow the words we hear, or even the silence we hear, to not only be filtered by our minds for meaning, but also by our whole body, our heart and our soul, as if we become like one big ear. That’s when we start hearing, no actually experiencing much more of the message the other human being is transmitting. And it’s then often our silence that forms the next question, not our words.

In silence we can learn to listen, not only to hear, not only to understand but to accept and connect.

 

 

Journaling questions for this chapter:

 

What is my heart longing for to hear?

 

What can I hear in the silence?

 

Where in my life do I want to practice more WAIT (Why Am I Talking)?

 

 

© 2024. Alex Verlek, Coaching Works International.

 

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