019 - The Whole TING - Are You Actually Listening?
influence-019-the-whole-TING-listening-01-audio
This is Dr. Tori. Welcome to the Influence Every Day show where we make every day better and we influence for good.
I mentioned in prior episodes that we can sometimes take a word from another language and glean a lot of meaning from it. Deep meaning, deep insights, things that we can derive useful lessons from. And, in fact, in 1959 and 1960 presidential candidate John F. Kennedy was using on his campaign trail a Chinese term that was the word for crisis, which is made up of two main characters.
And one character for the word crisis meant danger. And the other meant opportunity. Now, obviously from that, from the word crisis, that there's could be danger and opportunity. There could be a lot of lessons gleaned from this. And in fact, this is very popular in motivational speaking, certainly in the business world and in the investing world.
So they often quote John F. Kennedy's campaign trail. However, It actually doesn't mean that. So the word in Chinese for crisis is made up of two characters. The first one does, in fact, mean something related to danger, but the second one does not mean opportunity. It's just something that became a meme.
It became an idea that was spread and Nonetheless, it still is a truism. There is in crisis, there is danger and there is opportunity, but in fact, it wasn't true. So it turns out that had a deeper history where missionaries that had been to China before wrote some of this down in some anonymous journals, and then it spread in English and is still used to this day by motivational speakers, but is in not true.
Nonetheless, there is a word in Chinese. That we can glean deep meaning from, that can deeply impact all of our relationships, all of our interactions and our conversations. That word is the word to listen. The word in Chinese, to listen, which is pronounced ting, t i n g, is how it's often transliterated into English.
That word means to listen. many words in Chinese are made up of small pictographs. Many people who are familiar with languages like English, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, those languages have a system of root words, but Chinese has a system of pictographs, and so these smaller images in the word itself have meaning, and together, they have another meaning for the word that's written down.
In the word to listen, that word is made up of multiple other pictographs, multiple small pictographs within each one. And it's really powerful to take a look at what each of those pictographs means. Now, if you think about how important listening is in our professional lives, in raising children, in our marital relationships, in our friendships, in community work, in all of those things to listen is vital.
So let's take a lesson from the Chinese word TING. To listen.
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Now let's get back to Ting. So the first pictograph in the top left portion of the character almost looks like a big elephant ear. It literally means to hear, to hear. And if you think about it, too often we, if you hear, if you ever hear an argument that sometimes the way it starts, somebody says something, they're like, hey, they say something and blah, blah, blah.
And I'm like, yeah, I heard you. You heard me, but did you? Were you actually listening?
There's also deeper nuance to hearing. You can hear things that are not words, like tone or the pace at which someone's speaking, their cadence, their noises like grunts and sighs And not only that, you can hear changes. It may be that they have a certain tone to their speech and their conversation and then they change it up after you mention something or after something's brought up or a topic comes up or a thought that they have.
When you see a change, that's often the highest yield thing. So you can hear a change in their voice, you can see a change in their body language. The next portion, just below to hear, to me, it looks like the top of the brain if you're looking down on it and you're looking at its sulci at the deep sort of crevices within the the bulges of the brain.
It looks like the top portion of that as you're looking down, but that small pictograph means to think. To think what's really interesting is when we're having conversation, sometimes we are so focused on what we're going to say. We're thinking about what we're going to say. Like the words, your mouth is even moving.
You're just thinking about what you're going to say, but you're not actually thinking about what they're saying or what it means or what the context is. We're not thinking about what they're seeing or how they're experiencing it. Instead, we're thinking about what we're going to say next. But in the Chinese word to listen, part of it means to hear, part of it means to think.
Another portion means to be present, to be present, for it to be in the now, to be here with that person, in this moment, right now, experiencing this conversation, for all of its goodness and all of its challenges and all of its opportunity, to be in that moment right now, to be present.
That's another portion of the word to listen. To listen, the portion below that almost looks like eyeglasses and it literally means to see, to see. Now, if you think about it, we talk about the importance of nonverbals, nonverbals, by the way, mean non words. So there are sounds. That we should be hearing like tone, cadence, pace, et cetera.
Those things matter. How the quality of the words we're saying, the quality of someone's voice when we're hearing, but the other part of non verbals, a massive contingent of non verbals relies on visual, the micro expressions, body language, the surrounding context and how it's being responded to.
To see is part of the word to listen. Are we seeing? The other person. Do they feel seen when we're listening? That's the question. Now, the next portion of the word, another pictograph below it, below the part to see, means to focus. To focus. What are you focusing on? Where is your head going? How distracted are you?
How many other thoughts are creeping in and when they do creep in, how directed are you back to the conversation at hand? Back to the other soul you're communicating with at that point? How often are we focused? So what I sometimes do when I'm trying to focus and I start to slip, I pick something in their conversation to focus on.
I try to imagine what they're imagining. I try to see what they're seeing. I try to, and actually in the hypnosis world, they refer hallucinate. Hallucinate what they're hallucinating, meaning they're seeing something that isn't there, right? They're imagining or remembering or something. try to get into that picture.
By the way, this whole word, me learning about this word ting and all of its components comes from my hypnosis teacher. His name was Ron Klein. He in Maryland, D. C. area back in the early two thousands, he first exposed me to this word ting. And I've shown it in multiple talks whenever we're talking about psychological safety and creating a safe space to to be oneself and also to speak up when the time comes to present new ideas that might be slightly risky.
So I, I present it in those talks and I also present it when I'm doing training on difficult conversations training on how to have conversations with your children. my point here was to just to say my hypnosis teacher taught me this word and so I'm bringing it to you.
So anyway, after focus, the next one down, it almost looks like a a slice of the cardiac silhouette. So it looks like a heart and it literally means to feel, to feel, empathy is to feel what someone else is feeling. Are we feeling what the other person is feeling? Are we in tune with our own feelings?
And this is part of emotional intelligence. It's not enough to assess someone else's, but it's also important to note when our own emotional state pivots, when something changes, sometimes that's the point to turn on your observation skills, to turn on ting, to turn on your listening skills at a higher level.
When something changes. You detect a change in their voice. Maybe something, maybe something was said that triggered something for them. Maybe, maybe something else is going on. Maybe you need to delve deeper. Maybe it's an invitation to go deeper, and they need some support. Maybe you felt a twang of something where your emotions changed.
To feel, part of this word ting is to feel. And part of that feeling is your own feelings and being in tune with them, being aware of them and understanding how to address them, manage them, use them to bring this whole conversation, this whole interaction, this whole relationship to a better place.
So the word ting taken all together means to listen, but with all of its components to hear, to think. To be present, to see, to focus, and to feel. Wow, what a powerful word. if you go to DrTori.com/ting, DrTori.com/ting, I have worksheets and other resources available to you, a little interactive kind of graphic to quiz yourself and all that stuff on the different components of ting and how to be a better listener and therefore have better relationships and be a better leader.
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