Photo by Artem Sapegin on Unsplash

Have you ever had the experience of getting really engaged in a conversation, where you’re talking about something you love, something you’re excited about, maybe plans you’re making, and the person you’re speaking to gets excited too, and in that space, your ideas amplify and multiply, building and building, until you’re both walking on air? It’s one of the greatest experiences in life for me, so much so that I’ve spent many years exploring how it works, and how it doesn’t.

I first became consciously aware of it in a personal development course. It was an exercise in pairs, and the instruction was to pretend to not listen while the other person talked. I didn’t believe it would make much difference, and when my turn came, I started speaking about something that was important to me. Halfway through the sentence, my voice dried up. I couldn’t continue. I tried saying something else. Nothing. I went to talk about the weather, and that wouldn’t come, either. I couldn’t even talk about the weather when the audience was absent.

As a ghost writer, I noticed the opposite. If I really listened to my clients, what they said was better, more interesting, more insightful. I could notice when they’d got out of the zone and shift my listening so they came back. I could feed back a specific thing they had said so they would build on it, pick out the best parts, the most enlivened, and help them amplify that direction of thought. And when I thought back, I realised I’d been doing this my whole life. When I was five, I knew I could change they way my teacher taught by the way I paid attention. When I went to a lecture, I could alter the delivery by my level of engagement.

A journal can be great if you’re exploring something and the fascinated audience isn’t present – and it’s even more wonderful if you can find someone who knows how to listen and encourage.

With my friends, I listen in a particular way, hearing the things that excite them, giving positive responses, allowing them space to expand – and allowing them to do this for me in my turn. In coaching, this goes a step further, because the structure and intent is exactly this. This is why I love it so much, whether I’m the coach or the client – being in the space, mutually creating the space, where we contact and explore and nourish our dreams, amplifying them into something greater, and experiencing them in imagination so they can more easily form into achieved reality.

What could be better than that?

Jennifer Manson is an author and coach. Find out about Jennifer’s manifestation, goal-setting and future creation coaching…