The best in you
A recent dinner chat with a long-time mentor and close friend got me thinking about our very delightful first meeting and the larger question of what makes certain people bring out the best in those around them. I asked him this question, and he had clearly thought it through because he had a quick response: “I suspend judgment for as long as I can in every conversation.” We chuckled and moved on but the more I thought about all the other wonderful people who’ve ‘brought out the best’ in me and others around them, the dots started to connect very clearly.
These people listen, and listen very very well. They’re fully present in every conversation and listen with a very open mind. To listen with an open mind is to actively know and seek out the difference between fact and assumption — what is the other person really saying, and what is the listener’s mind extrapolating about them. If there are assumptions (and there always are), are there clarifying questions one can ask to further reduce the share of assumptions. Again, this is not to discount extrapolations that are hard-earned via years of experience and making mistakes. That’s human judgment and is responsible for a lot of the time saved re-learning the same lesson again and again. But most judgments are contextual and conditional, and what we often forget — is to check if those underlying conditions are still valid when we’re going around pronouncing judgments in our mind on a regular basis.
This manner of thinking and exploring cannot exist without genuine curiosity. And it cannot coexist with laziness. And in all fairness, many a time the tradeoff is between ‘getting to an answer quickly’ and ‘making the rightest possible decision’, and getting to an optimally fair answer quickly trumps the alternative. And that’s efficient. But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about conditions that bring out the best in us. And whenever I have met people who were fully attentive, curious and open to engaging where we differ, is where I have come away learning something new about myself, and really showing up in a way that took me by surprise as well.
And so the larger goal behind this note is to push the agenda of listening well. Our society and culture focus way too much on speaking. Which has reduced most broadcast media to sharply presented mediocre content. More music, less lyrics. But the power of listening well has sparked dreams, fuelled confidence, unearthed answers to questions not considered before. Truly unlocked human potential in so many ways. How different would the world be if we all gave each other a little more attention, listened with a little more open-mindedness, and suspended judgment a little longer because we might have something new to learn? If nothing else, it would make the people around us feel more heard. And that in itself is a gift so profound.