I had a profound experience yesterday.
It completely changed my understanding of something I thought I knew everything about. I’m going share the story, briefly enough to maintain your attention, but hopefully thoroughly enough to make you think.

I was on-set, in Clerkenwell, at a filming session for The Teens’ Speech. If you read this blog regularly, you’ll know that TTS is a project I’m very close to. Actually, it’s a project that I spend a lot of time explaining, articulating and framing for other people. Then yesterday, I realised something about it that I hadn’t really thought about, other than intellectually. Intellectual musings, though,  keep you at arms length from true experiences.

Nineteen year-old Tania was about to be interviewed. She sat in front of the camera in the centre of a large studio, surrounded by lighting rigs, wires and patches of discarded duct-tape from previous shoots. But mostly she sat surrounded by space and by quiet. It was a little cold in the studio – just cold enough to heighten your awareness of yourself in that space. I was sitting at the back, out of view, in the darkness. The atmosphere was a mix of serenity and tension. Everything was calm, but in the centre of the darkness, a nervous, professionally-lit girl was poised to share the most intimate details of her life.

I sat in absolute silence and I listened to Tania talk about her traumatic experiences of being bullied when she was younger. It was incredibly moving. As Vik had said to me earlier in the week, you feel priveledged to be there to witness such raw vulnerability.

About 25 minutes in, it hit me. Exactly what hit me is hard to explain, so I’m going to borrow the words of John Francis:

“Most of my adult life I have not been listening fully. I only listened long enough to determine whether the speaker’s ideas matched my own. If they didn’t, I would stop listening, and my mind would race ahead to compose an argument against what I believed the speaker’s idea or position to be.”

John Francis is the man who chose not to speak for seventeen years. He decided he wanted to ‘listen’. Listening is something we think we do, but as Francis says, our own ideas cloud the process. Very, very rarely do we just listen to anyone.

After 25 minutes of listening to Tania, I felt something unfamiliar; a sense of the world that I know, only without me in it.

I realised that this was the only time in my entire life I had ‘listened’ to someone for that long – uninterrupted – about such personal issues. And it was certainly the first time I have ever truly listened to someone younger than me. Make no mistake, it was profound.

It hit me that this is what The Teens’ Speech is about. It’s about listening in a way we never have before. And the act of listening is not (necessarily) about the person you’re listening to. It’s about you. It’s about your relationship with the world around you. It’s about understanding that if you don’t listen then you’re simply living in your own biassed world; a world that is anchored by your preconceptions and experiences. Listening can free you from that world, even if for a few minutes.

When we came up with the idea for The Teens’ Speech, I thought it would provide a reason for adults to listen, particularly with its clear reference to the Queen’s Speech. But I never appreciated what that really meant.

If you haven’t watched it already, I urge you to watch Francis’ video below. It is touching and thought-provoking. I hope it makes you want to listen more. I hope it makes you want to listen to the young people that will deliver the Teens’ Speech on Christmas Day.

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