I love to talk.

At the age of two, I was picking up our telephone receiver and talking to the dial tone. My biggest challenge in swimming lessons was taking on water due to my inability to stop talking. I really haven’t stopped since.

Then, just after finishing university, I spent a year working in business-to-business sales. One of the best things I learned during my training was to listen first and speak second. That what you say will be more powerful, more persuasive, and more helpful if you first take the time to listen and understand the situation.

When I talk before I listen, it tends to simply feed my own sense of importance rather than actually being helpful or meaningful to those around me. I see this lack of humility come through in my relationship with God every time I anxiously blunder in with lots of words rather than rest contentedly in him and listen to whatever He has to say – or simply to His presence with me.

What if we learned to cultivate hearts that were postured to listen first: to God, to others, to our bodies, to our hearts, to creation, to our neighbourhoods, to the cry of the world? I think we might find that our words and lives start to increasingly serve others, rather than ourselves.

The tone, content and impact of what we say when we speak (with our words and our lives) would shift significantly if we listened first. We would be people who strengthen others, bring healing, and even catalyse new possibilities.

I want to cultivate a heart that listens first by default. So if you’d like to join me, I’m going to start practicing curiosity. I’m going to ask more questions. And I’m going to practice holding back my own words until I have listened.

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