Upgrade your listening.

Ever felt like you've wasted time and energy because of ‘simple’ miscommunication? Simple, only with the benefit of hindsight.

"If only I would have understood my wife's true needs, things would have been so much easier."

"If only you could have made yourself be understood more clearly to your stakeholders, it would have saved so much time and energy?

You need to upgrade your listening. The 3 levels of listening capability are

Listening v1.0 - basic listening

Attention spans are decreasing worldwide. Population growth and competition make it harder to feel heard. Competition

And transferring information via words are inherently very limiting. They pass through linguistic, pronunciation, volume, emotional, fear and psychology filters in both the sender and recipient. By the time it lands with the listener, the margin of error in what was intended to be communicated in the heart and mind is 90%+.

Most people especially us men are stuck at listening to merely the content. Many of my male executive clients often bring up intimate relationship issues.

This is linear, intellectual, analytical listening. You apply your own way of thinking (that’s mostly masculine to my male readers) to then furthering the conversation assuming that your counterpart is of the same communication style.

Listening with ONLY the mind and intellect is insufficient. It will limit you. You will misunderstand situations.

I was operating at only this level of listening in my 20s. Women didn't make any sense to me at the time.

Listening v2.0 - high performance listening

You start taking into account the context. You broaden your listening from merely intellectually interpreting the dictionary meaning of incoming words. You take into consideration the context from which you are receiving information - the energy with which it's said, the information available from body language, the emotional state of the speaker. You have the awareness to know that information is coming from someone

Listening v3.0 - ultra performance listening

Listening 3.0 is listening with intuition to know WHAT to listen to and WHEN. With listening 2.0 powers, there's a lot of potential information there to take in and process. How do you assign a weighting to such a diverse set of information form which to draw conclusions? Masculine power finds itself lost and overworked here as it tries to linearly and rationally analyse the situation.

Feminine power knows WHAT and WHEN to listen to. It just knows. Call it intuition, gut feeling, whatever. The key point is with THAT information, the masculine then analyses and is spurred into the BEST course of action. This is the collaborative and synergistic power of the masculine and feminine energies combined. This is ULTIMATE listening power.