Inner Wisdom and Light

Hello hello, my friends, it’s time for another interview! Today we have the resilient, curious, and well-organized @audienta joining us, and I couldn’t be more excited to chat with them about their time on 7Cups. This is 100% one of my favorite interviews ever, and I know I’ll be referencing it again in the future. Please enjoy!

Hi Audienta, thank you so much for talking with us today! I’d love to start by getting to know you a little, what can you tell us about you as a person, as a listener, and as a leader?

As a person, I’m someone who is quite reserved and often overwhelmed when I meet new people, but I get open and caring as soon as I get to know the environment and the humans in it better. Fortunately, 7 Cups is a place that I know and feel comfortable in by now, so I can be the best version of myself. In fact, I’ve probably learned most of my social skills by observing group support rooms, doing trainings and mock chats, and finally listening to members and listeners here.

As a listener, I’m open-minded, non-judgemental and I’ve become more and more empathic over the years. The one trap that I still fall into from time to time is wanting to solve the problem instead of just listening. However, I really enjoy active listening since it opens so many doors and leads to a lot of internal growing and learning on both sides.

My passion for growth and learning as well as for helping my peers led to me becoming a leader. I love being able to support other human beings on their way.

A term that I’ve recently learned in the Leadership Development Program, “Service Leadership”, describes well what I try to do as a leader: I try to serve my peers, my mentees, and the community as good as I can.

At the beginning of your bio, you have a beautiful quote about inner wisdom and inner light. How do you access this? What impact does this have on you as a listener?

Well, I guess if I had a quick answer to how to access your inner wisdom and inner light, we’d all be enlightened by now… :P

So there’s the long answer that isn’t even an answer, but rather an idea: I try to access the inner wisdom and light by listening. Listening to myself, to my body, to my intuition, and to my feelings as well as listening to others’ intuition, others’ experiences, others’ wisdom, and others’ emotions.

If we create a room that’s as free as possible from judging thoughts, the space gets filled with this wisdom and light.

This may sound very theoretical, so let me give you an example that you most certainly know: Remember the last time that you were overthinking something again and again and thought that there’s no solution, no possibility for a positive outcome. Then, you talked to someone about it and suddenly there was clarity coming to your mind, and you knew the solution or the person you were talking to had a very obvious solution that you were overseeing the whole time. In my interpretation, while you were overthinking, you had a lot of judging thoughts in your head (e.g. “This is bad.”, “I can’t do this.”, “This won’t work.”, …) so there wasn’t any space left for inner wisdom or light. However, at the moment that you shared your thoughts, you either listened to yourself non-judgementally from an observer perspective, which opened up the space, or your listener listened without judging and opened up a space where wisdom and light could flow in.

That’s exactly what I’m trying to do every time I listen to someone: I’m trying to open up a space where inner wisdom and light can shine.

You are involved in both verifying listeners and anonymously evaluating them. What qualities do you look for in a really great listener?

There are some criteria that I look out for, for example, if the listener acts professional, uses open-ended questions, has a good response time, doesn’t judge, doesn’t give advice, does validate and reflect thoughts and feelings, is empathic, etc. If someone meets all of those criteria, they are a great listener.

A really great listener, for me, is someone, that I feel a real connection to. In relation to the previous question, it is a listener that helps me to open up this space for inner wisdom and light. If you ask me now, how a listener can achieve that, I’m not sure. I myself have only had chats that I’d call really great chats, in very, very rare moments. I think those were moments, where I was really connected with myself and could invite the member, that was open for it, into this space.

But I think being a great listener is more than enough. If we’re lucky, we get to experience a really great chat from time to time, but that can’t be the expectation.

What do you wish you had known earlier in life?

“Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.” (John Lennon)

The one illness that has taken away most of my hope, has been depression. I thought that it will never be okay again and since my psychiatrist had told me, that my form of depression is very unlikely to be healed one day, I fully believed it. But it’s not true. While it is very likely that I’ll never be fully healed from depression, I now know that I still will be okay. Since I have been able to get help and create a space for me in this world where I feel safe, I am okay in most of the moments, and in the moments that I’m not, I now know that I can trust that it will be okay again.

Who do you admire and emulate in our communities online, or otherwise?

For me,@SparkyGizmo is a listener that I admire a lot. They have really mastered what it means to serve the community and in addition to that, they know how to open up this space for connection and inner wisdom and light and do it with such ease that I’m just astonished and amazed every time.

How do you handle stress and burn-out on 7Cups?

Firstly, thanks to the different roles that I have, I can always choose which kind of task I’d like to do. For example, if I don’t feel like listening, I can do something for the care team or do an evaluation.

In addition to that, we’re a team here. If I don’t know the answer to a question, I can just ask another leader instead of getting stressed. If I don’t feel like I can give chat support at a certain moment, I’ll refer the listener to another chat supporter.

And lastly, I’ve taken multiple self-care breaks in the past and I only log in when I feel at least okay.

As long as you communicate, you can take as much time for yourself as you need, that’s absolutely no problem.

You’ve been with us since 2017! How do you continue to grow as a leader and listener?

I’ve grown as a listener and a leader as much as I’ve grown as a person. Every skill that I’ve learned here on 7 Cups, I try to use in my private life and if I learn something there, I’ll use it on 7 Cups. During the first year that I was on 7 Cups, I was only doing trainings and watching chat support rooms since I was too afraid that I’d make a mistake. But after a while, I grew, became a room supporter, then I started listening to members in 1-1 chats, became a peer supporter, and so on. Right now, I’m a trainee in the Leadership Development Program of the academy, and I’m sure that I’ll find a new challenge after that.

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