If we only listened with the same passion that we feel about being heard.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of listening to others with as much enthusiasm as we seek to be understood ourselves.
In this quote, Harriet Lerner highlights a common communication issue where individuals often prioritize their own desire to be heard over genuinely listening to others. This imbalance can lead to misunderstandings and weak connections, suggesting that true dialogue and effective relationships require us to actively engage in listening just as fervently as we wish to express ourselves.
In practice
During a team meeting to encourage better collaboration.
It is not fear that stops you from doing the brave and true thing in your daily life. Rather, the problem is avoidance. You want to feel comfortable so you avoid doing or saying the thing that will evoke fear and other difficult emotions. Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run but, it will never make you less afraid.
Telling a true story about personal experience is not just a matter of being oneself, or even or finding oneself. It is also a matter of choosing oneself.
Those of us who are locked into ineffective expressions of anger suffer as deeply as those of us who dare not get angry at all.
An intimate relationship is one in which neither party silences, sacrifices, or betrays the self and each party expresses strength and vulnerability, weakness and competence in a balanced way.
Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.
When thousands of people discover that their story is also someone else's story, they have the chance to write a new story together.
I've always kinda been a little outcast myself, a little oddball, doin' my thing, my own way. And it's been hard for me to, to be accepted, certainly in the early years of my life.
Don't try to change anybody. And they should let you be yourself, 'You loved me when you met me, so let's keep going!'
There's really no substitute for being able to sit across from someone, have eye contact, see and read their body language, hear the inflection in their voice in a real way.
Relationships matter: the currency for systemic change was trust, and trust comes through forming healthy working relationships. People, not programs, change people.
A man is a better citizen of the United States for being also a loyal citizen of his state and of his city; for being loyal to his family and to his profession or trade; for being loyal to his college or his lodge.
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