You can't truly listen to someone and do anything else at the same time.
Julian TreasureRead
The need to be right can arise from a fear of being disrespected. Or it may come out of the fear of being seen as we really are: as flawed human beings who are perfectly imperfect and full of contradictions and confusions.
Interpretation
The desire to be correct often stems from insecurity about one's worth and flaws.
Julian Treasure's quote reflects on the psychological motivations behind the need to assert one's correctness in conversations and debates. It suggests that this need may arise from deep-seated fears of disrespect and vulnerability, highlighting the common human struggle with self-acceptance and the fear of exposing our imperfections and contradictions to others.
In practice
In a personal development workshop discussing the importance of self-acceptance.
You can't truly listen to someone and do anything else at the same time.
The human voice: It's the instrument we all play. It's the most powerful sound in the world, probably. It's the only one that can start a war or say 'I love you.' And yet many people have the experience that when they speak, people don't listen to them.
Intention is very important in sound, in listening. When I married my wife, I promised her I would listen to her every day as if for the first time. Now that's something I fall short of on a daily basis.
Just three minutes a day of silence is a wonderful exercise to reset your ears and to recalibrate so that you can hear the quiet again. If you can't get absolute silence, go for quiet; that's absolutely fine.
People find birdsong relaxing and reassuring because over thousands of years, they have learnt when the birds sing, they are safe; it's when birds stop singing that people need to worry.
This devaluing of listening is handed down from generation to generation. There are many children who don't have the experience of being listened to by their parents.
The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.
We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.
Urging humans to be superhumans, on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self-abasement at their repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules.
Religion which requires persecution to sustain, it is of the devil's propagation.
I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even DuBois’s learning and Baldwin’s love and Langston’s humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art’s redemptive power, each man finally forced to withdraw, one to Africa, one to Europe, one deeper into the bowels of Harlem, but all of them in the same weary flight, all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels.
Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.
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