Masterful Listening is the Untapped Superpower You've Never Learned... Until Now

Welcome to the Masterful Listening Podcast. My name is Svetlana Saitsky. You can call me Svet if you ever call me. I'm so happy that you're joining today. You know, listening is literally the only skill we never learn. I mean, we're taught how to write, read, speak. When was the last time you took a listening course? If I was president, I would make that something that every single child had to do. I wish I'd learned how to listen sooner. And yet, it's never too late to learn anything. The executive coach in me knows that from working with thousands of people at this point, we can learn anything

that we really want to that we practice. And so this podcast is an opportunity to have some fun learning listening. Because I don't know about you, but for me, I learn better when I'm enjoying the way that I'm learning. And one of my favorite ways to learn is through storytelling. And frankly, one of my favorite ways to teach is through storytelling as well. Aside from being an executive coach, I am a facilitator of adult education. I teach adults coaching skills, listening skills, time management, delegation, prioritization, communication, all the skills, all the human skills, mental, emotional, spiritual, physical. I'm a big fan of integrative approaches. And so

I'm so glad you're here because the way that this podcast is going to work is the following.

Was the head of storytelling. I worked for a company called you caring.com, which then got bought by GoFundMe, if you're familiar. It was a crowdfunding platform. And it was actually the only one at the time that did not take a cut of the money, which was incredible for me because people were often raising money at the worst time of their life, you know, natural disasters, sudden surgeries, et cetera. So I love the idea that this company seemed to really want to give back to the people. And they created a role just for me, head of storytelling. This was a dream. I quit about 30 jobs prior.

I'll talk about that a little bit later. But the point was that I love storytelling. I've been a storyteller my whole life. I've told stories verbally. I've been a photographer, a videographer. I just love stories. We've learned through stories for as long as really humans have been around. And so I thought, what better way to teach listening and to share all of these incredible listening tools that I've learned and am still learning through stories. So I invite you to listen to the podcast as a listening exercise. This is not a podcast you want to listen to while you're, you know, putting away your clothes and have

it in the background. Uh, I'd say there's so many podcasts and incredible things you could listen to like that. This is a podcast to listen to when you actually have some time to set everything else aside. And yes, you do have the time. There's a difference between having time and making time. And so if this is important to you, find either three to five minutes a day, about 20 to 30 minutes a week, or about 90 minutes a month, which is the structure of this podcast. A little bit for those who have just a few minutes, a sort of listening mantra and tool of the day,

a story weekly 20 to 30 minutes, and then a 90-minute deep dive. I'm going to be having guests on this podcast. I always say the best thing about me is my community. And through the years, I have acquired quite an incredible set of friends, colleagues, uh, just people who have taught me how to listen, who have been so interesting and interested that I wanted to listen because I always say if you're telling a story, you might as well make it a good one. And if you're listening, you might as well be interested. Or else, why are we even speaking? Why are we even having conversations? You

know what I mean? All right. So that's a little bit about the structure. Let me tell you a little bit about myself. My name, as I said, is Svetlana. It means the light in Russian, but I am not from Russia. I am from Moldova. And Moldova, according to happiness research, is one of the unhappiest countries in the whole world. This fascinated me. I learned this piece of data when I was 20 years old on a train in Washington, DC. I was uh at the University of Maryland at the time studying business. And I just couldn't believe this. I mean, I was a pretty happy person. So

I wanted to understand what is happiness? What makes people happy? And how do I be happy at work? Because I knew that my goal in life was to do what I love. I've known this for, gosh, as long as I can remember knowing anything. I didn't dream of, you know, some really uh lucrative career working for someone else or getting married or having kids. That was kind of not in my view, but what I dreamed about was, oh, I want to do what I love. I want to be able to connect the left brain and the right brain, be the artist, the creative, and, you know,

put all those business skills into use. And so I spent my 20s as a happiness researcher within the corporate space. I sort of looked at it as putting myself through a real-world MBA. I worked at over 30 companies from Lululemon and Bloomingdales to Google and Apple. I've worked at startups, I've worked in the really deep corporate space at companies like Robert Half, a lot more traditional. I had to wear a suit. My suit was a little funkier though than the normal suit. But I just want to make the point that I got to listen and see and participate in so many different environments and meet so

many incredible people. It is there that I started learning. First of all, happiness is elusive. My journey from happiness led me into inspiration and then depression and then transformation. And then I've been in the resilience mode for a long time. And this year I am about to wrap up a Stanford medical school program all around compassion. I'm all about compassion right now because compassion is actually the first step to truly learning listening. We cannot listen to others if we first do not listen to ourselves. And I'm not just talking about that voice in your head that's always talking. That's by the way, not you, because we

are not our thoughts and we are not our feelings. But that voice is always running, like that annoying roommate. If you want to read a little bit more about this, the book that really opened up my eyes to this is Michael Singer's The Untethered Soul. When I read that book, I bought it for everybody that I love because it was profound for me to realize as a super emotional sixth planet in cancer human. That I wasn't my feelings, I wasn't my thoughts. Well, well, what am I? So I started observing this human named Svetlana. And wow, what a journey. I became a coach. I always knew

I wanted to become a coach, but I didn't quite listen as well to myself because when I was a bit younger, I was about 20, 21, when I came up with this dream. That voice in my head said, You can't coach anyone. What do you know? Right? Think about how often in your life you have actually told yourself you can't do something. As a little homework assignment, just notice the next week how often in your head you tell yourself you can't do something or you don't know how to do something. By the way, I'm gonna be infusing coaching tools throughout this whole podcast because one of

my favorite things to do as a lifelong learner is learn things in a simple way and have fun. Simplicity is genius. Albert Einstein said that it's one of my favorite quotes. I'm a big fan of mantras. I'm covered in tattoos that are all mantras. I design tattoos that have mantras and messages. I make hats and shoes that have mantras and messages. My company's called Rad Hats for Rad Humans. And I started it last year because making art has saved my life over and over and over again. And I call myself a mental wealth advocate because I believe that our mind, which is in our body, which

controls so much, when that's not okay, we're not okay. And so I've become obsessed, and I was always so curious about psychology, neuroscience, eastern medicine, western medicine, astrology. I mean, all the different, you know, all the tools out there. I always say take what resonates, leave the rest, and I invite you to do that in this podcast as well. So here's a few things I want to say about listening. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna tell a short story, and then I'm gonna invite you to listen in a certain way, to practice, and then you'll get a little bit of an assignment at

the end of this. So the first thing I want to say is when we think of listening, first of all, we think about it as you gotta listen to other people. Yes, and listening is actually for you. Like listening is probably the most selfish thing you could do to be of service to the world and yourself, because we really, as human beings, cannot do and give something we actually don't know how to do and how to give. If we don't have a skill, let's say we don't speak German, we can't speak with a German person in their language, right? So if we don't have the ability

to listen to ourselves, how are we gonna know how to listen to others? And how are we gonna respectfully listen and listen well? Because there's a difference between listening, and there's a different, and you know, uh uh, between listening and masterful listening. And by the way, what just happened here, the blah blah blah, that shit happens. All right, fuck it, move on. We all make mistakes sometimes. And I think that voice in our head that's critical, I call it the inner critic, the saboteur. Again, we're gonna talk about that in another episode, but the idea is that it gets so mad when we mess up. Maybe

you're listening and you got distracted. That's fine. Bring yourself back. The first step to changing anything or building anything is being aware that it's even a thing. So stay humble. Okay. I've been studying this listening genre for like over a decade. And I was told a few months ago that I'm a shitty listener by a friend. And that sucked because I wanted to fight. And then I thought, well, wait a minute, there's a difference between what people say and what people hear. There's a difference between listening and being heard. The metaphor I give is if I'm flying a plane and it's a smooth ride, but then

I can't land the plane, it doesn't matter how smooth the journey. So am I speaking in a way where the plane can land and someone can actually hear me? And am I listening in a way where the runway that I have will allow someone else to land their plane and know, wow, I get it. I'm with you. I hear you without making it about me, right? Typical example of that is someone's telling you a story. They just got back from Costa Rica, and they're like, oh my God, Svet, whoa, I did the coolest thing, and I'm really interested. And I go, oh my God, when I

live there, I did this, right? You're hijacking the conversation from a good place, and yet you're making it about you. So the way that I learned listening, and I teach this in my classes, and I'm gonna go over it in like a minute. So this is just a brief summary is you can listen at different levels. According to the Coactive Training Institute, which is where I studied, there's levels one to three. Level one listening is what I just said. Hey, I went to Costa Rica, I did this great thing, and you respond with, Oh my God, I've been there. What did I do? Dot, dot. Level

two, we want to be at level two. This means I'm really focused on every word that's coming out of your mouth. Not thinking about me. I'm not waiting for my turn to respond. How many of you and us have been in a meeting where you're already thinking of how am I going to respond? Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Level two, you're literally listening to every word coming out of my mouth. A trick that I learned in a leadership program is if you really get distracted, even right now, practice this. Repeat what I'm saying as I'm saying it. Go ahead and just speak out loud or

in your head the word that I'm saying. Actually, it should be in your head. And you might think, but how can I do that when I'm not in her head? And yet, if you're doing it, do you see how? You are so hyper-focused on the words I'm saying that you're out of your own head. It's pretty cool. Uh, level three though, there's a magic listening. I call it masterful listening. That is when you're not just listening to the words, you're listening to the energy. If you're talking to someone live, you see their face, you watch their body language. But even if you're on the phone, are

they sighing? Are they talking fast? Are they talking slow? You know, when we really focus, the way someone speaks is actually more powerful than what they say. And in fact, it's been proven that speaking is actually the least effective form of communication. When we listen to the entire being, ooh, I mean, that's masterful listening. That's what I want you to get out of this whole experience with this podcast. So let me tell you a short story. And here's what I invite you to do. The only thing I want you to do is try your best to really listen to the best of your ability. And notice

how often your mind, while I'm speaking, says something like, Oh, I agree with that. Oh, that's cool. Like, literally just notice what happens to your individual, brilliant, unique mind when you're listening. Don't make it good or bad. Just notice. As soon as you notice, come back. Come back to listening. All right. So I mentioned earlier that I quit about 30 jobs. I am literally the number one quitter. I am the best quitter I know. Uh, Seth Godin wrote a book called The Dip. If you're interested to learn a little bit about the right time to quit, that's a really cool short little book about it. But

the point is, I quit every job and every relationship as soon as I knew that it wasn't right. Now, in the business sense, if my manager or the person kind of beyond where I was, my leader was not someone I respected or wanted to be like, that's when I quit. Because whether you're growing at work, you know, vertically, laterally, no matter what you're doing, if the people you're working with, if the company, if the leadership you do not look up to, to me, it never made sense to stay. Plus, I was on this whole happiness journey. I was seeing all these cultures. I was seeing that

even at a place like Google, people were unhappy. That really fucked me up. Really. I didn't understand and I wanted to. So I kept moving because my internal voice said this isn't right. And guess what? Everyone said I was crazy. My Moldovan immigrant parents could not understand how I could walk away from six figures because I wasn't happy. My mom had to make sure she could feed me, right? My mom didn't have the chance to think about, you know, kind of the higher order needs, if you're familiar with the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? She had to focus on like surviving, but yet I had this

voice inside that said, no. I basically discovered all the things I didn't want. Same thing in relationships. As soon as I knew that someone was just not my person, I realized it was more important for me to leave than be comfortable and in the wrong relationship. I always say I prefer to be alone or in the right relationship. That's why I work for myself. I decided that's gonna be a better fit for me, but I think everyone needs to listen to themselves because the truth is, not everyone wants to work for themselves. It is a pain in the ass in a different way. Different problems, right?

People think they're gonna do something else and they're gonna have no problems. Yeah, probably not. Different problems. Choose your problems. So that's my story of how I am the best quitter. I quit everything, but the one thing I did not quit was myself. And now a lot of people are like, wow, that's cool. Yeah. Somehow in our society, when you like make some money and are stable, you know, and seem happy, they're like, oh yeah, now you're not crazy. Maybe you're even a genius. I don't think I'm a genius. I think we all have a genius, and I've tapped into my genius because I learned to

listen to myself and remember when we're listening to ourselves, there's the mind, there's the heart, there's just the whole body, and then there's your spirit. We're gonna go into all the different facets. We're gonna explore listening from every perspective. And remember, it's super selfish to learn how to listen. And you know what? The best things we can do are a bit selfish. That word gets a bad rap. What if the best thing we could do for everyone we know is actually go inward? That's what I've done. It's been a ridiculously insane, wild journey. But you know what? We're all multidimensional beings. We have different parts of

ourselves sometimes competing for our attention. And so figuring out what to listen to, what to throw away, how to listen. And what listening even means to us. We're gonna go into that. So, how did it go with the story? How many times did your mind say something? Maybe your heart felt something. Keep noticing that before the next episode, the short little invitation. If you want to do it, not a homework assignment, you have to do. You don't have to do anything. You can choose to just start noticing what happens when you're listening to someone and you either get really excited and start thinking about yourself, or

you get really bored and start thinking about someone else. As soon as you notice it, bring yourself back. Extra credit, write it down. Start making a little note every time this happens. And don't worry if you get really frustrated with yourself. It happens to the best of us. Remember, the only way to change anything is by first being aware of it. And also, you don't have to change shit. Uh, you are great, you are perfect. We're not fixing anything, we're just growing our capacity. Okay? We need to start remembering that we are all so much more powerful than we've been taught. Taught. Taught. And forgive yourself,

be kind to yourself, have compassion, listen to yourself, but don't beat yourself up, or else I'll kick your ass. I'm also a little bit of a comedian, and um, I like to curse. So if that doesn't uh land well with you, I hope you have a wonderful day and find someone who doesn't do that. No is a full sentence, my loves. It's cool to say no. Say no to what doesn't resonate, say yes and to what does, and I'll see you next time.