[Complimentary Mini-Course Lesson] Listening Your Way to Greatness

Published: Mon, 05/05/25

Updated: Tue, 05/06/25

----Listening Your Way to Greatness: ----By Dr. Joe Rubino

What you listen for determines what you get from your conversations. Too often, we listen in a casual or unfocused way and come away with little. We often find ourselves listening to our own thoughts and internal chatter instead of to what the person is saying. Let's examine a few ways you can get more by listening for more.

----Listening for the greatness in others.
A characteristic that powerful people possess is the ability to empower others to be their best. This is the ability to see things in others that they do not yet see clearly in themselves while creating the space for them to recognize this potential and rise to the challenge. It's about seeing others as great without any attachment that they live up to your expectations.

We instead, typically listen from our opinions and judgments. Listening this way filters out what is actually said and impacts what we are able to hear. How we see others - as powerful or ineffective, intelligent or slow-witted, insightful or with little to contribute - has everything to do with what we get from conversations with them. When we hold others as great we empower them to become so. Getting the most out of others - our spouses, families, friends, co-workers, employees etc. - is made more likely if we consider them to have the potential to be greater than they see themselves.

This is the Pygmalion effect. By listening to people as though they already are magnificent, those positive qualities we expect to see in them readily show up. As we champion them to excel, they become aware of possibilities in themselves they did not previously see.

Listening to others routinely in this way enables them to gain confidence and strength until they see themselves as powerfully capable of producing whatever effect they desire.

You have the gift to empower everyone who comes into your life. Likewise everyone has the same gift to contribute to you. Interact with others with the expectation that they have come to receive this gift of empowerment from you. Your job is to discover what that looks like.

Through your listening to contribute to others, they give the greatest gift possible back to you. They have supported you to become the person you have chosen to be on purpose.

----Listening for what others might contribute to you:
If you enter into each conversation expecting to hear something of value you can utilize, you will likely come away with that very thing. While generating this listening is easy with someone you consider to be powerful or insightful, it will require returning yourself to your commitment to listen with a positive expectation when his or her speaking does not reflect this power.

For example, if you typically listen to others in an impatient way - hurry up and get to the point - you will need to remind yourself of your commitment to stay present in a conversation with a slow and deliberate speaker. Remember, someone's style of speaking may have little to do with what you can garner from your conversation.

----Listening for what is important to others:
By putting yourself in the other person's world and developing an appreciation for his or her values and concerns, it is much easier to understand why they think, speak and act the way they do.

Misunderstandings that might have resulted in confrontation or lack of affinity are replaced with an empathy that allows for exploration of common ground. When you can hear the commitments of others, you act with a compassion that results from your interest in what it's like for them to be who they are.

----Listening with something at stake:
What we get from a conversation is often a function of what we have at stake. To illustrate this point, contrast how you typically listen to pre-flight safety instructions given by a flight attendant before take off. If you are like the rest of us, you're probably not really paying attention to what is said. You're probably either reading or distracted, figuring the chances of the plane crashing are slim to none. Besides, you've heard it all so many times before!

Compare this to a situation where, half way through the flight, the attendant announces that the engines have failed and the plane is going down. With your life at stake, you listen to the instructions like you have never listened before. Your listening is directly related to what you are listening for.

To gain the maximum amount from every conversation, listen from the viewpoint that everyone has something to share that is of great value.

Your intent is to get it regardless of who the person is, how powerful you consider him to be, no matter what his style of speaking.

Listening for value in EVERY conversation will provide you with unending insights that you would not get from listening with less at stake.

----Listening for the good intentions of others:
Another valuable listening involves coming from the assumption that everyone operates from what they consider to be good intentions. I am NOT saying that this is necessarily true. It is simply an empowering interpretation to support you in your relationships. This can be particularly valuable when the evidence strongly suggests the contrary.

A highly controversial, extreme example is to consider that someone as evil and deranged as Adolph Hitler operated from what was to him the best of intentions. This is not to condone his horrible actions. It is merely to illustrate a point. When you step into another person's world and attempt to see things as they do, it is possible to imagine that they have acted from good intentions.

Listening in this way allows you to come up with an interpretation that supports the possibility of your relationship with the person. This perspective may support you at times and perhaps not at other times. It is entirely up to you to use as just another tool in your toolbox to maximize your effectiveness with others.

------Listening For the Greatness In Others

1)	For the next 30 days, practice any or all of the following listening styles:

	To empower others to realize their greatness
	To hear how they might contribute value to you
	To appreciate their commitments and concerns and what it's like to be them
	With something significant at stake (perhaps your relationship to the other person)
	To hear the good intentions of the other person

2)	In your journal, note any insights or possibilities that were created by listening to others in these ways.

To Learn more about Dr. Joe Rubino's life-altering programs and books, visit

High Self Esteem Adults
High Self Esteem Kids
Life Optimization Coaching
Master Life Optimization Coaching
Self-Confidence Coaching
Certified Relationship Coaching
Certified Business Coaching
Live Your Dream Life Video Course
Journey of the Soul Brain Wave Program

To Your Best Life,
Joe

Dr. Joe Rubino

Please note: For those who may be unaware of my story, our commitment to others and the reason behind the personal development work we do, I have decided to share it below in all the emails we send out. If you are already familiar with this, please feel free to ignore it or forward it to someone you love.

To Your Best Life,
Joe Rubino
The Center for Personal Reinvention

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This is Joe Rubino. Thank you for being a valued member of our online community. We at The Center for Personal Reinvention are committed to supporting you with a wide range of personal development, health and other gifts and programs to assist you in living your very best life.

I have personally been involved in championing people to elevate their self-esteem, be happy, fulfilled, and empowered to believe in themselves and achieve their fullest potential since 1991. My vision is to impact the lives of 20 million adults and 20 million children to live their best lives by following the same life-impacting principles that I, myself, followed to reinvent myself at the age of 35.

Many have asked me to share my story with you in the hope that it may inspire you to realize that if I was able to embrace personal development and change my own life which was far from rewarding as you will soon lean, then you can as well. So, please allow me to share a bit about my story with this intention…

My earliest memory of an upsetting event happened at the age of 5 when I was playing at the house of a teen-aged neighbor. My parents trusted this group of teen-agers who had a long history of playing football with us little kids. Well, on this particular day, perhaps, they forgot their football at home so they decided to use me as their football. One kid tossed me to another who tossed me to another who dropped me. I hit my head on a rock and went home crying at the age of 5 with a big egg on my head and likely a concussion.

As a result of this episode, I decided that I was small, insignificant, and too weak to defend myself. I further made up that there was something significantly defective about me that would cause a group of much older kids that I admired and looked up to, to want to treat me with such rough disrespect. I further interpreted that these teenagers and people in general were careless, heartless, mean and cruel. And this is when I decided that the world was a dangerous place and that if I were to survive in such a place, I would need to find a strategy to protect myself from further harm.

The survival formula that I created involved avoiding people whenever possible. I became an extremely introverted kid, having few friends and avoiding most events and interactions with others. For example, if I was walking down the street on my way home from school and I saw someone I knew approaching, I’d put my head down, make off I did not see them and cross the street. As you can guess, I soon worsened my situation and became know as a big snob and a target for bullies. The greater the number of bad experiences I encountered, the more my self-talk reinforced the need to hide and protect myself. And, of course, the worse my experiences became. This vicious cycle continued throughout my high-school and college years.

My addictive background emotional mood or reactive state was “indignant anger.” I unconsciously looked for reasons to be angry with the mantra that guided my life being “How dare you!” It took very little to tick me off. If someone might cut in front of me while driving, I would react with anger and indignation – swearing at them and gesturing to them to show my upset. If I smelled smoke in a restaurant or public place, it would likewise tick me off and I would react thinking “How dare they! Don’t they know that second hand smoke kills!” In short, I was a walking upset waiting to happen.

While living in this perpetual state of anger and indignation allowed me to justify my bad behavior, dominate others and avoid being controlled by them, it cost me my happiness, my personal effectiveness with people, destroyed many relationships and diminished the quality of my life.

While contemplating which path to take regarding my career, I decided to pursue a career in dentistry. I unconsciously choose a profession where people would be unable to talk back to me and I could dominate them. Now, there is nothing wrong with being a dentist – it is an honorable and noble profession. But I had chosen it unconsciously for the wrong reasons. Again, I was unaware of the many ways that I sought both consciously and unconsciously to protect myself from getting hurt.

So, at the age of 35, I had been in practice for 11 years. Although I was successful by many of society’s standards – I owned two large practices that employed 7 full time doctors and 8 additional employees, made a significant income, had the respect of my piers and patients, I intuitively felt that I was playing small but like the proverbial frog who sits in a pan on the stove and fails to jump out of the pot as the heat under it is slowly increased, my life was mired in deep resignation. I incorrectly assumed that I was who I was and there was little I could do about my unhappiness and disappointments in life.

Well, there are no accidents as I was soon to learn. The Universe presents us all with unending opportunities for growth and expansion. We always have the choice of seizing any of these opportunities or we can maintain the status quo and continue along our familiar paths of convenience, protection, and resignation… or we can decide to risk boldly and take a new path that better honors our values and supports our inherent greatness.

When I was 35 years old, my dental business partner who was also an extreme introvert like me, was invited to attend a personal development weekend seminar. Although neither of us felt comfortable attending an event that was way outside our comfort zones, we both took comfort in going with someone else. So reluctantly we booked a spot at the course, knowing that we sorely needed to break free from the many limitations and negative self-talk that had ruled our lives.

To make a long story shorter, that 4-day course changed my life! I learned that my life was being run by decisions made by a 5-year-old and that I possessed the ability to break out of the self-imposed prison that I had created for myself. I discovered that I could identify my life purpose and step into that purpose while developing the many gifts that lay dormant inside me. I learned that I had the power to transform into a person that I could be proud of by taking my focus off of the many petty concerns that had run my life to this day and focus instead on something that would make life an exciting adventure by committing to devote my life to contributing to others!

By the end of the seminar, I decided to take the plunge and enroll in a 1-year rigorous program that involved being coached for 30 minutes daily, 5 days each week for a year and attending four 4-day intensives over that time span. During that year, not only did I learn the principles that would transform my life in every area but I decided that to fully honor my core values, to fully develop and share my gifts with others and to live my best life would require that I totally reinvent myself… So I committed to another 10 years of immersing myself into personal development. That 10-year commitment would soon be replaced with a lifelong commitment to learning daily the distinctions that would empower my own life and allow me to best serve others.

With this commitment to playing what I now recognize as “The Master Game” of impacting the lives of others by transferring “the power to succeed” I founded The Center for Personal Reinvention and began the process of creating structures to champion people to live their very best lives.
Over the course of the past three decades, I have created courses in self-esteem elevation for adults and children, life-optimization coaching and advanced life-optimization coaching, relationship coaching, self-confidence coaching, business coaching and abundance coaching – all with the intention to support anyone willing to see life differently by accessing the areas of what they don’t know that they don’t know, and learn the tools that have the awesome power to transform lives. Although I have personally paid tens of thousands of dollars to learn and develop these principles, my commitment has always been to make them ultra-affordable so that anyone willing to move their lives forward would have the knowledge of exactly how to do so.

As part of this commitment to champion people to be their best, we are now in the process of turning the three personal development fables that I wrote (The Magic Lantern, The Legend of the Light-Bearers and The Seven Blessings) into feature films that will share love, self-esteem and empowerment with the world thereby changing the state of our world which I fear is filled with hatred, violence, scarcity thinking, and despair.

As I approach my seventh decade on this planet, I decided to include my story in every email that I send out in hopes of inspiring like-minded people interested in either transforming their own lives or in sharing my vision of impacting the lives of at least 20 million adults and 20 million children with others.
It is only with your support that I will have the ability to impact the lives of this many people by sharing the principles that champion people to believe in themselves. The future of our world can indeed be marked by the soaring self-esteem principles that spread love to others, help them realize that scarcity is an illusion, and that the more we do to contribute to others, the more we will receive in return.

Thank you for allowing me to share my story with you.

I wish you peace, love, happiness and every blessing!

Joe Rubino
CenterForPersonalReinvention.com

PO Box 423
North Conway NH 03860
USA

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