Gwangju International Center

▶Date: March 29th

▶Topic: Be The Change Project

▶Speaker: Dana Han

▶Review Writer: Bakhodirjon Komilov (Baha) (GIC Talk Volunteer)

-          “Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding”

-Albert Einstein

How much do you agree with this statement or how much you understand the word “understanding”? Each of us has different opinion and experience to explain this. Our speaker Dana started her talk with this quote at the beginning. The topic was entitled as “Be the change project” and it was full of unexpected surprises. I was expecting to have just a typical speech that usually speakers come and share their own thoughts. However, it was really unexpected talk and got more interesting by involving the audience.

The talk after a while turned into an experiment under the name of “Be the change project”. The audience were sat as a circle by facing each other to learn how listen our partner. So, everyone had a partner to discuss the questions that were given by Speaker. There were three major questions that had to be discussed by people to learn how to be a good listener.

#Way to listen1 - was about to share the things we love that could be everything like people, food, physical things and so on.

Each person was supposed to talk 3 minutes and another partner should be silent, and after talk no comment, advice or questions. Personally, by doing this part, I discovered myself as a not good listener, because while my partner was talking I wanted to share my own things but couldn’t do it as it was rule.

#Way to listen 2 Memorable episodes from our childhood.

We always meet our friends but do not really talk our childhood memories very often. The second part was about “reflecting back” to our partner’s speech. It was such a moment that I could not say anything to reflect back. My partner shared her crazy and funny memories that she did when she was young, and my reflection was a bit awkward as it is because I had different childhood.

# Way to listen 3 - According to Bill Bullard “Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge… is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self-kind of understanding.”

In this part, we were asked to listen to our partners for what’s important to the other person, for their feelings, their values, their hopes and we were not required to give any opinions. For me this part was little hard to do. In fact, we were changing our partners after every question, and at the last part, I had to discuss with a Korean woman that could not speak good English. But it wasn’t difficult due to language barrier, but it was so different that I could feel her hardships by her speech.

In general, the talk was really useful to all of us including me too. I learnt a lot and people enjoyed and thanked to Dana for discovering their weakness. The project has really worked for most of us and looking forward her speech again coming this April 20^th with a project again titled as “Be the Change Project: Our feelings into Our Allies” .