LJ015: The Importance of Listening [Conflicts]

This week, we're sharing our first episode in the Conflicts series and we're talking about the importance of listening. We live in a world where, often, loud voices prevail. We want to get our points across, convince, explain, and control. But when it comes to our relationships, it's only through really listening that we learn about one another. Listening with openness and curiosity can improve our conversations, lessen conflicts, and strengthen our relationships.

We hope today's episode sparks some fun insights for you and we invite you to dive deeper with our Episode Questions. Join us on Instagram or YouTube to continue the conversation and share your reflections.

Let’s dig deep, challenge paradigms, choose connection, and live joyfully!

You can follow us on Instagram or YouTube.

EPISODE QUESTIONS

Download a printable PDF of this week's questions here.

Sign up here to receive each weekly PDF automatically in your email inbox.

1. Recall a recent disagreement with your partner or a close friend. Did you find yourself immediately feeling defensive? Was it hard to fully listen to what they were saying? What was going through your mind?

2. How does it feel when someone takes the time to really listen to you? When that happens, do you feel more open to listening to them? How do things unfold from there?

3. Have you noticed that you are more apt to take your partner or child's upset words or actions personally? How do you think that impacts the discussion that follows? Do similar conflicts seem to happen over and over?

TRANSCRIPT

ANNA: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. We're so happy you're here exploring relationships with us, who we are in them, out of them, and what it means for how we move through the world.

So, if you're new to the podcast, we encourage you to go back and listen to the earlier episodes. We started with some really foundational relationship ideas and have really been enjoying how they're building on one another. And if you've already been enjoying the podcast, we'd love it if you could leave a rating and a review wherever you listen. That definitely helps new people find us.

So, we've finished our foundation series of episodes and now we'll be rotating through three new series and they're going to be Conflicts, Parenting, and Relationship Tools. Today's episode is the first in the conflict series and we're going to talk about the importance of listening.

We live in a world where, often, loud voices prevail. We want to get our points across, convince, explain, control. But when it comes to our relationships, it's only through really listening that we learn about one another. And through that learning, we start to understand motivations and perspectives. I would say that 95% of conflicts I see between couples or really, people in general, stem from one person taking the actions or words of another personally and then reacting from that place. And we've talked before about the importance of remaining open and curious and in practice, that involves a lot of listening.

PAM: Really. It does so much. And for me, it harks back to what we talked about in episode three. People are different.

While my perspective feels like the right take on a given situation, remembering that people really are different helps me, as you said, be open to other possibilities and get curious to learn more about how the other person is just seeing things. And to do that, I need to really listen to what they're saying. And pulling back another layer on that to really hear the nuances of what they're