Listen - Silent Your Mind

I was watching a training video on YouTube recently, on "The Art of Charisma" and one of the main take-away for me was this: Charismatic individuals listen to you. They pay attention to what you are saying. They are focused on you. It's you they want to know more.

And she went on to say, if you scramble the letters in the word "LISTEN", what do you get? It actually spells "SILENT". Isn't it amazing?

Perhaps, allow me to share our experiences with the schools, where we discuss about the "culture" in the school. To begin, we always get the teachers to describe in their own words what do the school values mean to them. This process allows the school leaders and middle management to really listen, learn, then lead the entire school towards defining the desired culture.

In fact, a lot of things happen when teachers describe in their own words what do the school values mean to them. Firstly, they are describing it from their interpretation of the world. In other words, they are telling you how it is like in their world. For instance, for someone the value of "care" could mean really showing respect to your colleagues, while another may extend the same value towards the environment and community as well. Both are right in their world but they describe differently because of their interpretation of the world, their experiences, their background. This is where we say they reveal their mental models.

Secondly, when they describe in their own words what the school values mean to them, they are revealing their standards to you. They are telling you what is important to them. What would really make them upset. What would mean to "cross their lines". What would violate their trust. It is really important to pay attention to what they are saying here. This is where we say they reveal their values to you.

Finally, while facilitating such sessions, we always end of by asking them what it would be like when they have arrive at a common goal. In most cases here, the common goal would be the desired outcomes of the pupils. By giving them the context of the end-in-mind, we would invite them to describe the same set of values again. Here, our objective is to get them to visualize the context in which these values would be translated into desired behaviors when they have arrived at their desired outcomes. This is where we get them to bond together based on the shared vision.

Here, as a Big-Pictured Thinker, we need to be able to silent our mind and really listen. Not listen to respond but listen to understand. Listen to learn. So that we can expand our view of the world by understanding how other people think, how they perceive the world.