Listening's Transformative Power

The number one value undergirding Someone To Tell It To’s work is that every human being has value and purpose in this world. Regardless of any of the boxes or parameters in which we so often put others - gender, race, age, orientation, religion, nationality, socio-economic and educational status - we believe that everyone deserves to be given the respect of human dignity and the right to be noticed and heard.

That is why we first created Someone To Tell It To - to listen to those who were experiencing loneliness, pain, and grief, and living with regret, disappointment, fear, and longing for deeper and greater connections with others. 

That is also why - after all that we have heard through more than 20,000 listening interactions - we have also learned that we humans need to learn how to listen better. We know that we need to learn how to respect and respond to one another in more empathetic and healing ways. That is why we have trained more than 1,200 others in the art and science of listening, and why we educate the world through our books, blogs, podcasts, and speaking engagements. 

It is not enough that only our teams of Someone To Tell It To listeners listen. We need exponentially more people to listen - all around the world. 

It is why we are members of the International Listening Association and the Global Listening Movement. With the ongoing residual traumatic effects of the global pandemic causing increased mental and emotional health disorders, major wars and conflicts raging, and intense political divisions, our entire world needs the understanding of how our anxieties and conflicts can be changed through the love, understanding, and connection that listening brings to our lives. All aspects of our lives, professional and personal, can be enhanced and made better when we learn how to listen more deeply with one another. 

Each day, we have incredibly memorable and supremely meaningful interactions listening to others. We also - increasingly - have transformative conversations about the culture-changing power of focused and intentional listening, as we train and educate others. We can hardly contain our joy and gratitude at being given the privilege of entering into people’s lives in this reorienting and reorienting way of relating and collaborating in everything we do with others. 

Earlier in the week we met with a couple from Ukraine who are visiting our region, and with whom we have been regularly in touch with since the war in their country began, in 2022. They already had sacrificially and courageously taken more than a dozen orphans into their home and into their family, over the years and long before the war, to care for them and love them. Now, in addition, they work tirelessly for those affected and displaced by the war by providing them with food, clothing, a safe place to stay, respite, school supplies, medical care and teaching.  Their aim is to sustain those families and individuals who have been displaced by aiding in making ends meet so that they aren’t just surviving, but have hope to live a successful life in the future. They are giving those they support a better way of living in the midst of unspeakable horror. They spoke to us about the emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual traumas they have felt and witnessed as the war rages on. The devastating toll it takes is enormous, and will last long after the war is over. It is by supporting them through our work, that listening’s reach radiates outward and helps to heal the larger world.

Someone To Tell It To’s reach is all the way around the world. But it needs to grow. The world is desperate for change, for reconciliation, for peace. That is why we need to train and teach others to listen better, too, to grow that work exponentially. We cannot do it alone. But there is a growing movement of those who dedicate themselves to the “listening movement”. It is dedicated to showing the world - and every sector in it - that listening changes cultures, changes communities, and changes countries, by changing lives and relationships so that humanity has hope that in connecting better, we can be and do better for one another, together.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash