No! That can’t be true! When I see something or hear something, I’m taking it in. These can’t be outflows! Well, yes and no. Yes, you are receiving the vibrations of sound and the vibrations of light, so in that sense, you are experiencing inflows of energy. But something else is happening…
Consider where within yourself you are listening from. Are you listening from your mind or from your heart? If from your mind, then you (the small self) are focused on those vibrations and not much else. You are limited to the five senses and the mind’s interpretation of what it thinks it is seeing or hearing. And what it doesn’t catch or understand, it fills in with the stuff it makes up until it thinks there’s no uncertainty. BTW, this is at least part of the reason two people can witness the same incident and describe it completely differently. It’s also why, IMHO, with enough coaching you can recall “repressed memories.” Your mind fills in to provide answers to the questions you’re being repeatedly asked and encouraged to look for. (See “Implanting False Memories,” for example, for a more scientific look at one way this can happen.)
But, what if you’re listening from your heart? What then is happening? The heart creates an energy space around you that interacts with all the other energy spaces you encounter. For more on this, listen to Howard Martin, one of the founders of HeartMath, in a TEDx talk, describe what the heart is capable of:
So, when you listen “from your heart,” you are actually receiving a tremendous amount of stimuli through the interactions within the “heart fields.” What you receive complements what you receive through your eyes and ears. But there’s more. Your heart is capable of recognizing the “truth” of what it receives, unlike the mind, which only calculates but doesn’t know truth from falsity. Therein lies the popular exhortation, in making a decision, to “listen to your heart.”
So, what is the “outflow” of seeing and hearing? First of all, we have to expand our understanding of seeing and hearing to include all the stimuli we receive through the heart. “Seeing” and “hearing” then encompass all the activities that result from the interaction of the heart’s energy field with the other heart energy fields it encounters. If your heart is “closed”—that is, you’ve “disconnected” your head from your heart—you are unaware of this broader sensing of the heart through the field it generates—the “outflow.”
When you hear from your heart, a better term is “listening,” because you are now truly connected with what the other is saying—on multiple levels. If you remain in your heart, you take in “all” that the other is communicating to you—not just the words. If you then respond from your heart, the two of you have an exchange at a much deeper level than if you just listen with your mind.
A very recent example of this was recently exemplified worldwide. In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela expressed that, when he first met FW de Klerk, he felt de Klerk listened to him and “he could do business with this man.” Many years later, in an interview, de Klerk recalled that when he first met Mandela, he felt that Mandela listened to him, and “he could do business with the man.” Both of them listened from their hearts, and while they strongly disagreed on many things, they were able to work together to end apartheid and to establish democracy in South Africa (see Time magazine‘s special issue on Nelson Mandela).
So, why did these last three blog topics come up at this time? For the past few months, I’ve been drawn to the concept of authentic leadership (see “10 Ways to be an Authentic IT Leader” and “10 Things Authentic Leaders Do” for example). These three blogs (20, 21, and this one) are all very relevant to what I’ll have to say about authentic leadership over the next few days. Stay tuned if the topic intrigues you in any way! And especially stay tuned if you’re a small business owner (from 1 to perhaps 200 employees)!
