Speaker 1 · 0:03Good morning, everybody. Orin is one of my favorite mindfulness teachers. I highly revere his practice. He's a practitioner, former Buddhist monastic. He teaches on mindful communication. Just a wonderful human being. I just took a six-week mindful communication class with him and just find him to be a very genuine practitioner. Walks the talk, and it's an honor to have you join us today, Orin. I'm excited about what you might share with us around mindful communication, mindful living. It's a pleasure to welcome you here.
Speaker 2 · 0:52How do we train ourselves to lead with presence, to have this fundamental foundation in our conversations and relationships? Now, what we're doing here is a kind of interpersonal mindfulness, right? We are taking that skill of cultivating presence internally and bringing it into the space of relationship. One of the first practices is learning how to ground your attention in your body. The body doesn't go into the past or the future, it's always right here. So the more we can have some attention with our felt experience in the moment, the more present we are. Another very powerful practice for leading with presence is to learn how to pause. Doesn't need to be a long pause, could just be half a breath, a couple of beats. But in the space of that pause lies all the difference in the world and how you show up. So we pause before we listen, we pause before we speak. Whenever we need to, we can just take a beat. And that gives us that space to reconnect with our intentions, to choose our words more carefully. Very powerful practice for leading with presence. The more we explore pausing, the next thing that you might start to notice is that with awareness, we have conscious choice over the pace of our speech. In day-to-day life, this might not matter that much unless you're in a some kind of role like Sean or me. If you have a leadership role in your community or organization, if you're managing people and you're speaking to others, paying attention to your pace is very important because that's your instrument, right? That's how you are sharing and receiving information. You want to have mastery over that. In difficult situations where there's conflict, what tends to happen? It escalates, things move quickly. So the more we can pause and pay attention to our own pace, the more we're able to bring the conversation back into balance. Another very powerful result of modulating your pace in speech is that we speak with our breath, we use our breath to speak. If you change the pace of your speech, you're changing the pace of your breathing. Change the pace of your breathing, you're modulating your nervous system. So if you're activated in a conversation, you feel frightened, you feel tense, you're anxious, you're worried, you're noticing a tendency to want to control things or get defensive. There's energy flowing through your nervous system, right? You're activated. The sympathetic nervous system is aroused or you're on high alert. If you slow the pace of your speech down, even just a little bit, that's gonna slow your breathing down, which is gonna have a calming effect on your nervous system. So another very powerful way to lead with presence, bring more mindfulness into conversation. One more, which is more of an advanced practice that we're not gonna get into so much today, but I want to at least indicate it, is what's called relational awareness. And this is the capacity to be aware not only of yourself, but of the other person, of the connection between you, to whatever degree that's present or absence, as well as the space around you. And this is a very rich training learning how to widen your awareness to include different reference points and fields between yourself, the other person, the space around you. So let's talk about some of the reference points for grounding in the body briefly. So with mindfulness practice, we learn how to rest the attention with an anchor. And there's certain anchors that are beneficial, helpful, conducive to leading with presence and conversation. So the experience of gravity or weight in the body. What I call the center line, which is the not exactly the spine, but the sense of the central axis in the body, kind of in the middle of left to right and front to back. There's an imaginary line, a sort of core axis that runs from the top of your head all the way down through the perineum. It's a place you can rest your attention. Breathing, classical mindfulness practice. Touch points, the hands, the feet, any place touching the ground, any place of high sensation, your lips, your tongue. These are all areas where you can rest your attention. And then last hearing outside the body, just being aware of sound. So we can train ourselves around one reference point that is accessible in conversation. You don't need to use all of them. You only need one. So the principles behind coming from curiosity, having an intention to understand in a conversation are very obvious when we really look at it. Number one, how we are talking about things is often as important, if not more important than what we're talking about. This is that whole body language, tone, gesture, uh dimension of relationship. And how we're talking is shaped by our intention. Next, goodwill creates trust. When we're really curious, the other person feels it, and that's going to go a long way. Even a few words of kindness in a difficult moment or conversation can have a large impact, can change the whole atmosphere, the whole tone of the moment. Finally, if we're really coming from an intention to understand, we're really getting curious, wanting to understand the other person, that starts to build not only the relationship, but the kind of essence of what we're actually talking about. And the more understanding we have in the conversation, the easier it is to find solutions. So this is the general arc or general trajectory of what we're looking for when we're communicating intentionally and skillfully, is we use the tools that we have to build understanding. What's important to you, what's important to me. Once we get to that level of shared understanding, we can work together to figure out where do we go from here. So to come from curiosity and care, to really have a genuine intention to understand means to listen. Right? How are we going to understand anything if we don't listen? We have to make space to show up to really hear the other person. So a real dialogue requires listening from both people, but it can start here. Without listening, no communication happens. We're just sending messages to each other, but no one's actually receiving them. When we're able to listen, it sends a signal to the other person that we're interested. It builds goodwill and trust. And over time can build understanding. We get more creative options because we're identifying what's actually important, and it can bring healing and resolution. So this is very powerful. And I think we all know this because we've all lived. We've all lived enough years to know when I can really listen to someone that's moving things in the right direction. The question is, have we trained ourselves to remember, to learn how to listen when we're triggered, when we're activated, when we're defensive, when we're stuck in our ideas about what should have happened and who's right and who's wrong. It's easy to listen when we're in a good mood and we're feeling loving. That's not when we need the skills. When we need the skills is when we're when we're in those tense moments. So this is why I talk about communication practice as a training. We train ourselves to have access to these intentions and practices so that when we need it, we can draw on our training. This is a quote from uh Dr. Rachel Naomi Reman, who's an author and has done a lot of work with uh palliative care and um working with patients. She says the most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention. So I want to tell a short story before we go into the next next part of this training in intention. I was uh teaching a retreat, teaching about mindful communication. And one of the participants who had been studying with me shared this story at the end of the retreat about leading with presence and coming from curiosity and care. She'd been in a marriage for 10 years or so, and they had their fights as most couples do. This one particular time they had an awful fight, just terrible. It was so bad that they were ready to throw in the towel, and her husband was walking across the room, heading towards the door to leave, like leave the marriage, leave. And she paused. She took a pause, she took a deep breath inside. She came back to her intention. What's most important to her? She was able to find just a seed, just a spark of genuine curiosity, of an intention to understand. And she called out to him, she said, Billy, wait.
Speaker 3 · 11:04And he stopped and turned around. And she said, I think that if we're both willing, if I'm willing, if you're willing, and we can just try to understand each other, we might be able to turn things around.
Speaker 2 · 11:27And with that invitation, he walked back in the room, sat down on the couch, and they started actually listening to each other. And they were able to stay together. It takes that capacity to go against the tide of all of our reactivity, our fear, our anger, to just pause and to come from somewhere else inside to change the dynamic, to have a different conversation than the conversation we keep having over and over and over again. So coming from curiosity and care is about our capacity to listen, to make space for the other person. That then forms one of the most fundamental building blocks in communication. And this is where we start to get into the mechanics. This is where we start to actually learn how do I build understanding? Because it's one thing to listen, it's another thing to really understand each other. So this is a kind of comical truism about communication that's been attributed to George Bernard Shaw, although no one can actually find where he said this. But who says the greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. So much of the time in our relationships and conversations, we are arguing and fighting over things that the other person didn't even intend. We're reacting to the projections and interpretations of our own mind. We're not actually really even hearing each other because people don't always say what they mean, right? We say one thing and mean something else. We're not even sure. So listening is just the first step. What we want to do is to learn how to complete the cycle. How do we confirm that message sent equals message received? If we're not doing this, we don't know if we're actually understanding each other. So listening starts to open the space up for understanding. But then what we want to do is we want to make sure that we're hearing accurately. And if I say something and then I say to you, do you understand? and you say yes, I don't know if you actually understood. All I know is that you think you understand. I don't know what you've understood until you actually tell me what you've heard. So this capacity to complete a cycle, to confirm that message sent was message received, this is the fundamental building block of communication. Right? When we can't do this, communication breaks down. One person says something, the other person reacts and says something else, then the first person says something else, and we just keep layering message upon message upon message, never actually slowing down and stopping to see, are we connecting? Are we hearing each other? Did that first message you sent, did I actually hear it? And do you feel complete? When we do that, we complete a cycle. The whole thing settles. It's like, yes, that is what I meant. Now that piece is done, and there's more space to move on to something else. So the fundamental tool for this in communication is called offering a reflection. This doesn't mean that we are like pondering, thinking about something, reflecting. It means like a mirror reflects something. So a reflection is a restatement or inquiry about what's been said to confirm that we understood. When we don't do this, we end up in a conversation where both people are talking and neither person is listening. And it's like being on a cell phone call where the call dropped a long time ago and both people are still talking. And I think we've all had conversations like that, right? So what reflecting does is it confirms that we're still connected, that we're actually hearing each other. So the training here that I encourage and that I offer is to do something called to reflect before you respond. Someone says something and you're ready to say, no, that's not true, or here's what happened instead. If you do that, if you respond right away, the other person's not going to be able to hear you because they don't feel complete. They just said something and you didn't receive it, even if you heard it. Even if you understood, they might not necessarily feel understood, right? Those are two different things. So reflecting before you respond, taking that beat to say, okay, let me see if I heard you. Here's what I'm getting, confirms that message sent is equal to message received. It builds understanding, it maintains the connection, and it helps the other person feel heard so that they can settle and have more space to hear you. Another benefit of reflecting before we respond, particularly in tense conversations, heated conversations, is that taking that time to reflect slows the conversation down. Naturally, if we're checking if we've understood, the pace gets dialed back and things don't escalate as much. So there are many ways to listen. First, just listen. Just listen with silent presence, with warmth, with curiosity, with all of your being. This is a very powerful and transformative way to listen. We can also listen and reflect by summarizing what we're hearing. So this is listening to the story. This is listening to the content. We can also listen a little bit deeper. We can listen with empathy for what's actually in the person's heart, for how they're feeling, for what's important to them. And it's a deeper kind of listening underneath the story, underneath the content for what's actually in the person's heart, how they're feeling, what's important to them, what matters. So the aim of this kind of listening, particularly when we offer a reflection, we're saying back to someone what we've heard. This is not a communication technique. If you practice active listening, more likely than not, it's gonna fall flat because it's not genuine. This is about genuinely wanting to understand. Okay, so the intention, the aim is did I hear right? I'm checking. I'm not telling you what you said. That's patronizing. I'm checking if I've understood. Did I hear right? So I want to make sure I understood. That's one aim. The other aim, how can I help you feel heard? How can I signal through word, gesture, tone, that I'm with you, that I've understood? How can I give you the relief of feeling heard? These are the aims behind offering a verbal reflection. And this verbal reflection, this is an expression of that intention to understand. It's a tool that we use to embody and manifest that quality of intention. Now, the last thing I want to share with you is probably the more complicated part of communication. Listening is easy compared to speaking. How do we say what we actually mean? How do we get across what's in our heart to someone else? And this is first the recognition that to say what you mean, you have to first know what you mean, right? We have to do that internal work with mindfulness to identify how do I feel? What's important to me? What do I really want? Rather than just speaking in the moment from whatever reactivity or judgment or interpretation is at the top of our mind. So in order to do that, you can ask yourself three questions. The first question is, what do I want to say? This is the question most of us ask ourselves, but we stop there. And if we stop there, we don't get to the deeper meaning. And we also don't learn how to communicate in a way that's going to build understanding. So, first, what do I want to say? Do that on your own with a friend in a journal and just let it rip. Blame, judgments, as much as you want, whatever you think you need to come out, professional, personal, just get it all out. Then the next question is what do I want the other person to know or understand? As you do that, you can then investigate what's really true. So this is what I'm telling myself, but you can look at the observations, feelings, needs, and requests to get clearer about what's actually happening for you. Then ask yourself, what do I want the other person to know? What is it I want them to understand? Not just what I want to get off my chest. Communication is about building understanding. So, what is it that you want them to understand? This adds another layer to the conversation. Then the last question is how can you say it in a way that they can hear? This is about recognizing that who am I talking to? Where are they coming from? What are they going to be able to hear? This is in our own best interest. It's not about being inauthentic or catering to someone else. It's about recognizing if you want to be understood, it's in your own service to consider what does this person have the capacity to hear? So, in looking at what they can hear, there's a couple of principles. The first is that when people hear blame, they shut down, they get defensive. So the less blame and criticism, the easier it is for others to hear us. And that that template of identifying what happened, how I feel and why, and then making a request, offering a suggestion. Here's what I think would help. That's going to help take some of the blame out. The second key principle here is try to chunk your information. Don't flood it. Don't just say everything all at once. People get overwhelmed. You have more clarity and more power when you use fewer words. Just share one or two things and then see how it lands. Break it down into small steps. Finally, what we're looking for in expressing ourselves openly, honestly, and directly without blame is to bring together a sense of authenticity, the truth for us, with our care for the other person, so that they can actually hear what we're saying. So, what's really true for you? What would you like them to understand? And then connect with your own heart. Where do you really want to come from? How can you say this in a way that the other person can hear? So this obviously takes time, but this is just indicating to you a little bit of the terrain of how you can work to shape your own speech, your own self-expression, so that one, you're clearer about what's happening for you. Two, you have a better sense of what it is you want the other person to understand. And three, you're getting more skilled at expressing that in a way that gets the message across to the other person. In nonviolent communication, the broader training is to look at four different components. And I'm just going to share this briefly. I'm not going to go into depth, but I want to give you a sense of the model. It's a way of training our attention to identify what's important in any given situation by asking ourselves four questions. What happened? And really being able to make clear observations, distinct from our interpretations and evaluations, the things that we add. How do I feel about it? What emotions are moving through me? And the actual feelings we experience rather than the judgments and the blame and the interpretation in our mind. So instead of you, you know, I feel judged, which is a story about what you're doing to me, I feel confused, I feel hurt, I feel upset, how I actually feel. There's nothing to argue with there. The needs, why, what's important to me. And last, where do we go from here? How do we move this conversation forward? So the training of attention, that's the foundation of nonviolent communication, helps us identify these different components in ourself, in someone else, in any given situation, so that we can communicate and get on the same page about what's happening. So I've shared a lot of information with you. I don't expect you to integrate all of it. It's like giving you a lay of the land. But what I do want to encourage you to do, lead with presence, come from curiosity and care, focus on what matters. We looked at pausing, slowing down, feeling your body. We looked at offering a reflection, reflect before you respond. And we looked at how can I express the truth of my experience in a way the other person can hear? How can I bring together being really authentic with some sense of care? All of that, what's one thing that really makes sense to you that you want to integrate into your life? Take a moment or two and just think about that. What's one aspect of what I've shared with you that you would like to practice and make real? What's that one thing you're going to practice? And I can guarantee if you just stick with it day by day, you'll see changes.
Speaker 1 · 25:40Any of you come across his mindful communication course online, I highly encourage you to take it. His book, Say What You Mean, is, in my opinion, an instant classic, and it's one of the two or three books I've ever recommended to my family. Oren, thank you so much for the work that you do in the world. I'm excited to get my hands on your book about teaching mindfulness to adolescents. I'll be sharing some slides with you and some more information about Oren and the mastermind area. Again, thank you all for coming. Oren, thank you for your teachings today, and I wish you all well.
