 Today, we are going to talk about listening. Now, it always feels like a bit of an irony-clacksen moment when I start talking about listening because one of the things we'll talk about is the need to shut up. And all I'm gonna do is talk at you for the next few minutes. But, well, you know, that's how this is gonna work today. Listening, why listening? Listening really matters. And as someone who works with or cares for or otherwise supports children and young people, one of the most important skills that you can have is to be a good listener. You might already be a pretty good listener, but one thing I've learned over the years is that we can all get a little bit better. So I'm gonna share five steps to better listening with you today. And just listen in, figure out whether there are any of these that you might be able to make small improvements on and give it a go. Be curious, see what difference it makes in your next interactions with a child or indeed with an adult. Step number one is focus. Okay, so to be a good listener, to enable someone to feel genuinely seen and heard by us in a really authentic, genuine way, we need to focus on them entirely. We do not have to create acres and acres and acres of space for them in our lives. We need to create maybe just a small amount of time, but a time when they are our entire focus. For those few minutes, and it might just be a handful of minutes, they are our entire world. We're gonna close down all the open tabs in our brain. We're gonna take our phone and turn it off. We're gonna shut down the computer. We might, if we're in a work context, put a sign on the door saying that we're busy with this child. We are gonna clearly tell them, show them, demonstrate to them, they matter more to us than anything else right now. They're right at the top of our to-do list. Everything else is gone, they are our entire focus. This can mean that three or four minutes with a child can have more impact than an hour of unfocused time. So make it count, really focus in on them. Make them your whole world. Let everything else pass by. Number two, get curious. I think about the idea of curiosity a lot in my work. And when we get curious about the children and young people that we're listening to, that is when the conversational magic really starts to happen. Now this can help us in several different ways. One, it can help to build bridges. So if you are listening to a child or a young person who's got a particular passion or interest or skill about a certain thing and it's something they wanna talk about and they seem happy to talk about it, get curious about it, ask them questions about it, learn from them. Let that role reversal happen and let them step into the role of kind of parent or teacher and you step into the role of kind of child or learner because maybe on this topic, on this thing, they know more than you do. Sometimes that means we have to do one of my favorite phrases, suspend our disinterest. So you know like when we're watching a fantasy film or reading a fantasy novel, then we have to suspend our disbelief. Sometimes when it comes to hearing a child and getting curious about what they have to say, then we need to suspend our disinterest. You might not care about, insert topic here, trains, dancing, pop band, ex, I'm not gonna name one or I'm gonna age myself horribly, rabbits, whatever it might be that this child happens to be really passionate about and knowledgeable about, you might not care that much about it yourself. Suspend that disinterest and get curious about their thoughts, their views, their experience, their ideas, their knowledge of this thing and actually just allow yourself to get a little bit proud, a little bit interested in how much they know about this thing and sometimes it'll be a really like niche thing that you didn't even know there was so much to know about. So I've had some really interesting conversations about Minecraft recently which is massive and there's so much you can do in there but like the lack of understanding I had of quite how big of a thing and a place it was and all the different things you could do that came to the fore when I was listening to a friend of my daughters recently and he told me a lot about Minecraft and it was great hearing him talk about it like I didn't know this stuff, I learned a lot from him. So suspend your disinterest, get curious, let them step into the role of expert and admire their skills, their knowledge, their expertise here. You can also get curious about the stuff that a child is opening up to you about so maybe your child is talking to you about some really difficult thoughts or feelings that they're having or maybe they're facing some difficulties with food or exercise or perhaps they've been self-harming and sometimes here we've got like a million questions in our head but we're not sure if it's appropriate to ask them and so we don't because we don't wanna make things awkward or weird and we don't wanna kind of like say the wrong thing but if you've got these questions actually if you can be brave enough to ask them then both you and the child will get a much better understanding about what's going on for them and when you are brave enough to ask the difficult questions so you might say I don't really understand very much about self-harm and I find it quite upsetting to think about you doing that and I'd really just like to understand a little bit more I mean how does it make you feel? Like why does it feel like a good or helpful thing to do and just actually asking the question, getting curious it can really help the child to feel seen, feel heard and can really help with that conversation obviously don't take the conversation to places that you don't feel like appropriately equipped either emotionally or knowledge wise to deal with but if you've got questions sometimes just being brave enough to ask them will really, really help the child to feel heard Number three is about validation so the child that you're listening to will not necessarily have all the appropriate vocabulary language, words, I can't find the words for words right now but they might not actually understand or have the words to explain what's going on for them and they might not be sure whether it's okay that they feel that way so one of the things that we can do as that adult particularly for a child whose emotional literacy is not great is to give those feeling names is to validate the way that the child is feeling by naming those feelings and recognizing that I can see that you're really angry about this I'd really like to understand a bit more about that or that sounds like an incredibly challenging situation it must have really hurt you to hear your friends talking about you that way or whatever, it's not about saying I get it, I understand, you might do and sometimes that might feel like an appropriate thing to say but just beware that particularly teenagers will often say no you don't get it no you don't understand, nobody does but me so just be careful there but you don't have to fully understand it but you can recognize and reflect the feeling, the emotion, the experience that you think that you're seeing there that will validate this feeling for the child sorry you might just be able to hear buddy snoring in the background there so validate, validate those feelings name them, explore them, say them out loud and make it quite clear that it's appropriate and okay for the child to feel the way that they're feeling and to experience those emotions particularly the tricky emotions like guilt or shame or anger or sadness like all feelings are valid it's what we do next with them that really, really matters number four is about reflection so we can reflect what the child is saying in our own words, reflect it back at them summarize it, use our own words and this will show the child that we have been listening to what they have to say because we can't put into our own words something that we've not been listening to so by reflecting back using our own words to explore and express their experience shows yep, I was listening it's also really important because it gives an opportunity for the child to correct any misconceptions or misunderstandings that you have so put what they've said into your own words reflect it back at them and give them some space to correct it if it was wrong and finally, number five is shut up so one of the best ways to enable a child to feel heard to enable them to explore what they need to say is for us just to resist the urge to jump into the conversational gaps so that's hard, that's really hard because very naturally as humans we always want to fill the gaps in the conversation it feels really awkward we imagine the tumbleweed going by when things are quiet and a very short period of time can feel very long when it's silent but if we can resist the urge to jump in and fill the gap then the child will generally fill the gap one thing to remember here is that just because it's quiet for you and you're feeling totally awkward doesn't mean it feels like that for the child who may have a lot of noise going on in their head they might be frantically searching for the right words to say or trying to get calm enough to say the thing that they need to say or just generally working through a cacophony of stuff so it might be quiet for you but for them it might be kind of noisy and I like to think of this like my yarn so I like to knit and sometimes if I've not been very astute about putting my yarn away it all gets tangled up together that's maybe what your kid's brain is feeling like while you're having this conversation and sometimes the quiet that we allow just gives them enough time to work out actually it's the red yarn that I want now and trying to tease that out and getting it into a sensible kind of ball so that they can then unravel it in a way that makes more conversational sense so sometimes they need that little bit of quiet my top tip here, I always wear a watch and I will sometimes like literally look at the time and go I'm gonna allow a minute to go by before I speak again so maybe do that, just make a note and say I'm gonna allow one minute to go past before I end up jumping back into the conversation final tip here, walk and talk I talk about this all the time but if instead of sitting and speaking you either do alongside or you walk and talk and have this conversation on the move then those silences can happen just a little bit more naturally and you'll feel less like you need to jump in and fill the gap so I hope it was helpful so those five things again we're gonna focus, the child is gonna be the sole focus of our conversation for the next few minutes all other brain tabs are shut we're going to be curious we're gonna ask questions we're gonna explore those things that are in our mind and allow the child to become the expert too we're gonna validate we're gonna name those feelings and we're going to explore and express what we think the child is feeling particularly if they don't have the words to express that well themselves yet we're gonna reflect we're gonna use our words to summarize what we think we've heard from the child and give them the opportunity to feel heard and to correct any misconceptions and we're going to shh and avoid always jumping in the gap but allowing the child to do so instead