Perhaps the most transformative experience we can offer to our relationships is in the gift of deep listening. This is often confused with the surface listening most of us are trained to do, where we focus our attention on the words being said and prepare ourselves while someone else is speaking with our response. Listening in this way makes a couple of big presumptions: that we are able to say what we mean with our chosen words and that the other person can get our meaning through those words. This often leads to miscommunications where it is easy to jump to conclusions or veer the conversation into an entirely different trajectory than was intended.
