 Okay, according to experts on active listening skills, there are four different levels of listening and conversing. The first one is called download. This is a superficial way of listening to what other people say. We just listen from habits because we are social beings. As Christina has pointed out before, we are not isolated creatures. We don't live in the forest. We live in a community. Because humans are political beings, as Aristotle said long ago. So it's out of politeness that we listen to other people. There's a second level which is called factual listening. And, well, it's slightly different. We are listening from the outside. We're not really emotionally engaged or involved in the conversation. Just pretend that we're listening. We adopt a sort of critical attitude. We can contribute something to a deviated conversation that is going on. But it's not really deep listening. Well, the third level is much more interesting. It's empathic or empathetic listening. It's listening from within yourself. It's empathizing with the person who is in front of you. It's mirroring what that person is feeling. That's the basis of fruitful and rich dialogue. And then you've got the fourth level, which is generative listening. Which is listening from the field. It's looking at a conversation from multiple perspectives and angles. Remember what we talked about yesterday when we discussed design thinking. So generative listening is a door open to a world of possibilities. Because when you listen to what another person has to tell you, well, it's the beginning of a learning experience, a memorable experience. And that's the basis of true knowledge. Just think about ancient philosophers. Think about Socrates and Plato. Their way of listening was generative, productive. It led to cultivating interesting philosophical ideas. And this is the kind of listening that we should cultivate in our classrooms. Okay, here you have a handful of seven active listening skills. Just have a look at them and see whether you identify with them or not. Do you practice these active listening skills? Are you attentive when you're taking part in a conversation? I mean, in a deep way, not in a superficial way. Do you ask open-ended questions? Questions that give the other person the chance to go deeper into how he or she feels. Into his or her motivations, aspirations and dreams. Do you ask proving questions? Do you request clarification? That's important. If you request clarification, that means that you care for the other person. You care about what she or she is saying. Do you paraphrase? Do you put the same message in other words? Are you attuned to and reflect the feelings of the person talking to you? Do you summarize? Just closely connected to paraphrasing. This is a handful of active listening skills that you could try yourselves in your everyday life and that you could try and put into practice in your own classroom. So just to sum up, what does it mean to mindfully listen to others? This is the Chinese ideogram 14, which is the verb to listen. So to mindfully listen to others means to keep your eyes and ears wide open to what the other person is saying. To keep your mind and your heart open, receptive to what the other person is telling you with and divided attention. So you're present here and now. So your mind is not wandering away. You're not looking at your, I don't know, 100 WhatsApp messages or your Gmail messages. Your attention is undivided. So before, active listening is the basis for healthy and rich relationships. So you better start cultivating active listening. So keep calm and use active listening. And now we're going to do a practical exercise which is going to be guided by Christina in which you're going to put into practice this listening skills that I've been presenting to you briefly. So let's do an active listening dynamics and let's start to learn to be or to become great listeners. The first problem that we have when we are talking to others is most times that we're not even listening to ourselves. Our minds are wandering away. We are completely disconnected from our own being. So in order to be able to listen to others, firstly, we need to be aware of ourselves. And how do we do that? We were doing that yesterday and we will continue to do it today. Our class today is also mindfulness. So what we're doing today is giving you more tips about mindfulness. What we're doing today is now different from what we were doing yesterday. Yesterday you had just an introduction to mindfulness but today we continue to go deeper into what mindfulness entails. So we're going to do now an activity related to active listening. But we can't actually actively listen to others if prior to that we are not aware of who we are and where we are and how we feel. So do you remember that I was saying that emotions cannot be understood from here? Was I saying that? So before doing this active listening activity we are going to do a very touching meditation in which I'm going to invite you to deal with a difficult emotionally involved situation that happened to you in the past. Before this meditation and then the active listening activity. If someone doesn't feel comfortable when we're doing this meditation, just be with it. Don't try to change how you feel. Just be with it, alright? And if someone doesn't feel comfortable, if still you don't feel comfortable, stop doing the meditation. Because we are aware that this meditation can be difficult. Okay? So I'm going to invite you to put your tables down and to make yourselves comfortable in your chairs. Make sure that you are sitting in a comfortable position that will allow you to stay like this for several minutes. Make sure that your feet are on the floor, that you can feel the floor and that you can feel your own body sitting down, staying still in your seats. Bring your attention now towards your breath as it comes in and out of your body. Scanning your body now, do you find any tension somewhere? If you find some tension, just breathing with your tension is fine. No need to fight that tension. Just exploring this tension with your beginner's mind. Inspect it as a detective with your breath, accompanying it, being with it. And if you don't have any tension or if you feel comfortable, feel that in your body. Stay with your body, whatever your body has to tell you. Take your breath to those parts of your body and feeling how you are breathing thanks to those muscles, to those bones, those joints in your body. Allowing them to be, allowing them to stay actively with you while every flow of air keeps coming in and coming out of your nose. You are here within your body. You are here now. And this is the only moment that you have this present moment in this nice room. In this particular moment with yourself, focus in the rocking movement. Your body moves slowly like the waves in the ocean with the air on the flow of its waves. Now that you stay in this relaxed situation, let me kindly invite you to work with a difficult situation that you have experienced in the past. Make sure that the situation that you choose is not extremely hard, but a situation that you can't remember clearly. Think for example of a situation in which someone said or did something that caused your anger or that caused your sadness. But don't choose a very difficult and complex situation. We are going to go through a formula proposed by the Zen Master Zikna Pans. This formula is divided into five steps and I'm going to guide you through these steps. Once you've chosen your situation, now allow yourself to imagine it as vividly as possible. Recall the context in which it happened, the stimulus which triggered it. Your emotional state when that happened and your personal circumstances that explain why you reacted in that way. Now that you have recalled the situation, let's go to the first step. Think and try to bring to your memory the physical symptoms that you felt. Maybe it was pressure in your throat or maybe your heart was beating really strongly. Maybe you had a headache or maybe gave you a stomach ache. Try to recall those feelings in your body, those sensations in your body. Was your breath becoming more agitated maybe? Was it more shallow? Take your time to identify all those sensations that took place of that particular moment in the past. Now that you have all these sensations in your mind, maybe now you are ready to name the actual emotion that you felt. Was it anger? Was it fear or was it sadness? Now that we have just covered the emotion, we have covered the first step. Let's go now to the second step. The second step has to do with acceptance. Is it possible for you to accept this emotion without blaming yourself, without being hard on you and without adding more pressure to yourself. Just accept that I have this emotion that I don't have to fight. I just have to be aware that this emotion is here accepting it, not resisting it. I am a human being, and as a human being it is okay to have this emotion. I can create the space within me for me to be with this emotion and this is okay. I have accepted my emotion. Now that we have covered this second step, now that we have accepted our emotion, we are ready to go through the next, the third step. Allow yourself to go back to your breathing and breathe with the emotion. Be with your emotion. Inhale. I have this emotion with me. I am feeling this uneasy emotion and it is okay. Let it be. Exhale and feel this uneasy emotion within you. It is already here. It is what the present has brought to me. Embrace it and be with it. It is okay to be with it. Now that you have covered this third step, we are going to make our way to the next step. We are going to gain distance from this emotion. I have this emotion now, but I am not this emotion. I am the witness of my emotion within me. I observe it, but I am not my emotion. I am bigger, greater than my emotion, so we are going to observe it, gain in distance from it. I am going to invite you to observe this emotion with two attitudes. The first attitude is high respect. Let's respect this emotion. And the second attitude is to observe it with love kindness, loving kindness, with gentleness, with love. Imagine your emotion as a baby. As a baby crying. Your emotion is your baby. And you are the mother holding the baby in her lap. You love your baby. You love your emotion deeply. And you take care of your baby, of your emotion until your emotion calms down. Allow yourself to be patient, to be gentle, and to be understanding towards your emotion, towards your baby. Now that your emotion has calmed down, you have created the space to respond to the situation, rather than to react, to oppose, and to fight your emotion. You have given yourself the space you need, the place where you can suspend your judgment, your prejudice, your reaction. And in this space you can observe your inner self without any noise, without your mind going crazy, jumping here, jumping there. You can hear in this space truly understand the real, on the deep causes of that emotion. Let's move towards the end of this meditation now, by going to the last step. It is now time for you to think what is your real intention in this difficult situation. And it is time for you to think now and to remember it before responding in a mindful way. Which is my intention? Which is my guide in this situation? As we approach the end of this meditation, take a moment to thank yourself deeply for having devoted your valuable time, and for having been brave to face this emotion. Take a deep breath, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. As you go back slowly, I want to revise with you these five steps. Step number one, recognition. Let's recognize that we have this emotion. Step number two, acceptance. Can we accept that we have this emotion? Step number three, do you remember after accepting it? Yes, we are kind towards it. We are with it, we let it be. Next step, let's take care of it. Let's gain distance, let's be with it, creating the space. This fourth step is creating the space. Instead of reacting, I've got this WhatsApp and I need to take a look at it immediately. Let it be, maybe you are doing something which is more important. If someone said something which hurts you, that's okay. Would you respond immediately? Maybe it is better to just be there, understand how this person feels. Maybe this person doesn't have that space within herself. So maybe understanding this person is so stressed out that this person is not doing that because she is against me. This person is suffering and maybe this person is saying this because she is suffering. Maybe she doesn't mean to. Maybe she doesn't, she is not aware and that's why she is doing it. Last step, which is my intention. Maybe this person is going through a bad time, let it be. My intention is respond, let it be. Maybe approaching the person, are you okay today? Maybe that would change the whole thing. So this is the very base of active listening. We are going to do the active listening activity now. So for this, we are going to ask you to be in pairs. And we are going to give you three questions. We are going to give you three minutes. And we are going to do the following. We are going to do the first step is we have this question. One person speaks and the other person only listens actively with all her senses open up. Active listening, never interrupting, never putting my own mental schema on the other person. Just listening. This is the first step. When the person has finished speaking and once that we have been listening actively, the person who has been speaking has to be the mirror. Do you know what being the mirror means? So what you have to do is to reflect, to give the person back what she said. When I play the gong, you will stop and then we will do a next step. This next step will be, now that you have told me, now that I have given the same back to you, I am going to share with you what has impressed me most about what you said. Only one thought. I got really impressed by how brave you were, by the way you express this. Okay? So I will play the gong. First time to start, the person speaks. Second time to reflect, the other person reflects the image. Third gong, the person who reflected also adds one little emotion, idea, feeling she got when listening in true communication. Do you follow the dynamics? Okay. I am going to ask the question. I am going to give you one minute per person. Okay? One minute. Are you with your peers?