Be Your Best: ‘I believe that listening is the single most important skill that anyone can develop’

Kingsley Aikins, Founder & CEO, Diaspora Matters

Over the last few months I have been doing the Potentialife programme which I was introduced to by Daniel Philbin – Bowman.

I was delighted to have had the opportunity of participating because so much of what Potentialife teaches and preaches is close to what I do with my company Diaspora Matters.

So for me there was a bit of cognitive dissonance – if these guys were convinced of the validity and worth of what they were doing then that reinforced me in what I was doing.

At first the thing that impressed me most was the calibre of the people behind the project and the fact that they left hugely prestigious organisations like McKinsey and Harvard and put such a massive amount of effort and experience into developing the course. They truly walked the walk and not just talked the talk.

It seemed to me that they were driven by a messianic mission to bring their thinking, which they truly believed in, to as wide an audience as possible. What started with me being intrigued, curious and interested evolved and matured into being fascinated and passionate about the approach they took. It seemed to me that they had put a great amount of thought and experience into designing the course and that Potentialife was a lot more than just a regular online training course.

This was nothing less than taking a deeply philosophical and worldly wise approach to getting to the core of who we are, what we do and how we do it in our personal and professional lives. As the course developed I found myself more and more identifying with it’s underlying premises and increasingly drawn to its key messages.

At it’s heart the course is about focussing on one’s strengths and using them to build self confidence and self esteem. It’s about making small changes that have big impacts, about exercising strengths on a regular basis, about being positive and about how mindfulness and meditation have big impacts, about how, to use their words you have to ‘take your mind to the gym’ and about how important it is to constantly have a sense of gratitude and make fun part of our lives. (Having worked abroad most of my life I always get asked the same two questions – what was your favourite city to live in and why did you come back to live in Dublin. My answer to the first is Sydney and to the second is that in Ireland you have more laughs per minute than in any other country in the world…..!!!!).

None of the points that Potentialife focuses on are new or revolutionary and, in fact, we probably all know them. However what Potentialife does is to remind you of how core they are and it gets you to focus on them in a very compelling way through the methodology of the course and through suggested practical changes and exercises.

I was particularly interested in their module on listening and this is because it is one of the core elements of the Networking Training Programmes that I deliver to senior management of major corporates in Ireland and elsewhere. In fact I believe it is the single most important skill that anyone can develop – the ability to become a world class listener.

However people are not taught to listen. Nor are they taught how to network. Schools and universities don’t teach networking and companies don’t have strategies for it but everyone agrees it is critically important. Potentialife, in identifying the power of listening, believes it is the single most important characteristic associated with great leadership.

My experience of living and working in 6 countries around the world for over 25 years is that most people are pretty bad listeners.

Most people only listen to allow themselves time to prepare what they are going to say next. They think listening is a form of inactivity and a sign of weakness. They think that convincing others is all about talking. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Smart people realise that listening to truly hear what the other person is saying is a form of activity and the ultimate stimulus of creativity. Listening intently without interruption to what the other person is saying encourages the speaker to think more clearly and improves the quality of what they say.

Listening then becomes an important catalyst for developing good independent thinking. It counters our natural tendency to be narcissistic listeners' ie immediately interpret everything we hear from our own stand point and interrupt the other person to tell them what we think….which is not at all what they want or are interested in. As Dale Carnegie, the author of How to win friends and influence people said in his classic book….."to be interesting, be interested".

Potentialife really hammers home these points with examples, references and exercises. There is something for everybody on the course and it is partly reminding and reinforcing what we already know and partly introducing new and original thinking.

The one thing for sure in this rapidly changing and globalised world is that success in the past is no guarantee of success in the future and the strategies that got us to where we are today will not get us to where we want to go to tomorrow. It was the British anthropologist Charles Darwin who put it best – “it is not the strongest of the species that will survive, nor the most intelligent but those most able to handle change”.

Potentialife is a most useful tool to help us survive and thrive in this ever changing global landscape and equips us with the necessary skills, behaviour and attitude changes to help us navigate potentially hostile environments.

The Be Your Best programme sponsored by the Irish Times is being delivered by Potentialife, a nine-month leadership development programme that incorporates the latest in technology and behavioural science. See more at www.Potentialife.com