If you want to help heal the world and create peace on earth - learn to listen!

Meet Ximena. She’s brilliant, articulate, and passionate about helping others develop this powerful skill. We had such a rich conversation about how learning this skill can quite literally change everything for the better.

Ximena Vengoechea is a user researcher, writer, and illustrator whose work on personal and professional development has been published in Inc., The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Huffington Post. She is the author of the new book, Listen Like You Mean It: Reclaiming the Lost Art of True Connection (from Portfolio Books/Penguin Random House). She is a contributor at Fast Company and The Muse and writes "Letters from Ximena," a newsletter on tech, culture, career, and creativity. She is best known for her project The Life Audit. An experienced manager, mentor, and researcher in the tech industry, Ximena previously worked at Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

In this episode:

• Learn why listening is the key to intimacy and connection.
• Why listening can be such a gift and such an act of generosity and love.
• Why when people don’t feel heard, they often escalate their behavior and lash out.
• Why listening is a “slow” skill and how to bring more peace into our lives by learning to do it.
• There are layers to listening, and often if we are paying attention, we can hear other important things that get revealed when we truly listen.
• How to protect yourself from being a listening martyr and getting listening fatigue. In other words, how can empaths protect themselves when they are deeply listening to others?
• Learn how to listen with compassion without taking on the emotional energy of someone else.
  
• Why awkward silence is such an important part of the listening skill set.
• Conduct a relationship audit to determine where you have energy leaks.

Links:

• Ximena Vengoechea
• Book - Listen Like You Mean It: Reclaiming the Lost Art of True Connection: Vengoechea, Ximena
• Newsletter - Letters from Ximena
• Instagram - Ximena Vengoechea (@xsvengoechea)
• Twitter - Ximena Vengoechea (@xsvengoechea)
• Pinterest - Ximena Vengoechea (xsvengoechea)
• LinkedIn - Ximena Vengoechea