There are things in life that we simply must experience in order to know. Someone can tell you what it feels like to experience or witness the birth of your first child, but the actual experience is in another realm altogether. The same is true of love. You can read sonnets, hear romantic songs, and understand the biochemistry, but until you experience love, it’s all just a bunch of words.

Only when we recognize our shortcomings can we begin to remedy them. Only when we perceive our true strengths can we leverage their power. And only when we seek what we don’t know can we really start to learn.

Don’t make listening a chore. It doesn’t have to be hard work. Make it fun. Make it a game. Make it a treasure hunt. What could be more interesting than discovering new things and increasing our powers of perception? Listening is a never-ending journey along an ever-improving road.

The key is to keep asking, keep probing, keep drilling down. If you activate your natural curiosity, every answer you get may generate new questions, and then new answers, followed by more questions, and so on, in an ever-rising ladder of understanding.

Discomfort may be a doorway; don’t run from it.