My second track in Maiden Castle Memories was Sound of Silence written by Paul Simon.
“People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening…”
I liked those lyrics in 1964 but it wasn’t until 2017 when I discovered NLP that I believe I truly found their meaning. The music and the raw power of the message enabled me to bridge the gap of approximately 50 years – no mean feat and a tribute, I feel, to the significance and the brilliance of Simon and Garfunkel.
Taking time to understand
I take the meaning of the song, and how it’s featured in my life, to be – speed is not important, ‘getting it’ is. This element of time is, if you like, an extra personal layer but one which deepens the message of strive to ‘get it’. To understand before all else, even if that takes time. ‘Seek first to understand’ is the objective we should perhaps all have. If it takes a seriously long time for a penny to drop, that doesn’t matter, because for all that time you have been genuinely trying to understand the message you are being given. In other words, you have been hearing, not just listening. Take the time to understand what the other person wants to say before you launch into putting your own views across.
Paying tribute
On a different, but in some ways equally connected subject, I was honoured to be giving a tribute at a funeral of a dear old friend last week. That experience was painful and yet cathartic and has made me think even more deeply than usual about many things, including this blog. Just as nearly 50 years went by before I ‘got it’ with regards to the meaning of the track we’re discussing today, so it was an awfully long time before some of the guests at that funeral took this life-focussing opportunity finally to really listen to people they hadn’t seen or talked to for ages and finally ‘got it’.
Listening is a deeply respectful act
The coincidence of the delivery of the funeral speech and the writing of the blog was obviously not deliberate or controlled in any way, but I would be disingenuous if I said I didn’t feel the message was made more powerful and striking to me by these circumstances. Listening is a deeply respectful act and requires authentic curiosity in others in order for it to work. Getting into that state of mind may take years, as I showed with ‘Sound of Silence’, or it may take an age to find new-found flexibility to look at a different viewpoint, as my friends at the funeral showed. Whatever it takes, there’s no doubt that the result is worth it in the end. The pleasure to be derived from the enhanced relationship available once you start to listen and hear is amazing – as Simon and Garfunkel of course knew well!