In this episode, Brian speaks with Ted Brodkin and Ashley Pallathra about their soon-to-be release book, Missing Each Other: How to Cultivate Meaningful Connections. Learn all about the four components of attunement: relaxed awareness, listening, understanding, and mutual responsiveness and become a better listener!
Five Ways to Cultivate Meaningful Connections From Ted and Ashley:
- Attunement – It is the ability to be in tune with what is going on with your own mind and body, and to be in touch with another person through all the twists and turns of an interaction (e.g. having a conversation, playing sports together, playing music together, etc.).
- Relaxed Awareness – The foundation of attunement. It means being aware of yourself, your environment, including other people while staying calm and relaxed and letting go of tension.
- Listening – Take relaxed awareness and focus it on another person and what they are communicating. It’s not just hearing the literal meaning of the person’s words, but also noticing the nuances of their communication, their tone of voice, the pauses in their speech, their facial expression, their eye contact, their body language and so on.
- Understanding – Relaxed awareness and listening help to facilitate a better understanding of your own filter and the way that your internalized biases, and your lived experiences are filtering the way that you hear what people are saying, and your capacity to understand how someone one else is communicating with you.
- Mutual Responsiveness – The culmination of attunement. When people move and connect in such elegant and intricate interaction, it is magic!
