Listening with Attention (Shorter) | Employee Retention

With Listening with Attention, a participant in the Innerleaps employee wellbeing program trains attention through sound. That carries over into how they listen in conversations at work. The session belongs to week 5 of the Core program, part of the 6-week Innerleaps employee wellbeing program, stress management training companies use to increase employee retention. Week 5 points attention outward, at another person. In a conversation your own thinking keeps running while the other person talks, and before you know it you are loading your answer instead of listening. The session works as follows. The participant sits comfortably, ideally listening through a speaker. First a short scan from feet to crown, then an anchor in the breath. Attention then opens to the sounds around them. They do not go looking for sounds but receive what arrives, hearing them as raw qualities: dull or sharp, high or low, near or far, without naming what they are or whether they are pleasant. They notice how a sound arrives, stays a moment and passes, and the silence in between. When attention drifts, they return to the breath and open to the sound again. Sound is not a better anchor than the breath, but it sits outside the participant, and that is the same outward attention listening to another person asks for. What that produces in a conversation was shown by Itzchakov and colleagues in 2017: attentive listening lowers the speaker's anxiety, so they become less defensive even on difficult and emotionally charged topics. That the attention itself is trainable comes from Jha and colleagues, who reported a 17 to 24% improvement in sustained attention in 2021. Participants at a Dutch client organization of Innerleaps rated the program 8.1 out of 10 and their trainer 9.3. Daily practice in week 5 of the Core program. Play it through a speaker if you can, and turn noise cancelling off if you use earbuds, since it filters out the sounds you are practising with.