Please Just Listen

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.

~ Earl Nightingale

We must be silent before we can listen.
We must listen before we can learn.
We must learn before we can prepare.
We must prepare before we can serve.
We must serve before we can lead."

~ William Arthur Ward

Please Just Listen

Please, just listen. When I ask you to listen to me, and you start giving advice, you have not done what I asked. When I ask you to listen to me and you begin to tell me why I shouldn't feel that way, you are trampling on my feelings.

When I ask you to listen to me, and you feel you have to do something to solve my problem, you have failed me, strange as that may seem. Listen!

All I asked was that you listen, not talk, or do... just hear. Advice is cheap: twenty-five cents will get you both dear Abby and Billy Graham in the same newspaper, and I can do that myself. I'm not helpless. Maybe discouraged and faltering, but not helpless.

When you do something for me that I can, and need to do for myself, you contribute to my fear and inadequacy. But when you accept, as a simple fact, that I do feel, no matter how irrational, then I can quit trying to convince you and get about the business of understanding what's behind this irrational feeling. And, when that's clear, the answers are obvious and I don't need advice. Irrational feelings make sense when we understand what's behind them.

Please listen and just hear me, and if you want to talk, wait a minute for your turn, and I'll listen to you.

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