Chen Lizra of Somatic Intelligence Wisdom Academy On How To Listen Effectively To Succeed Personally And Professionally
An Interview With Doug Noll
Become a better leader in your professional life — I worked with a client of mine who is a sales director on her presence and compassion. She leads a whole sales team and used to be very much about sales goals. What she realized from doing this work is that she needed to feel her team, and this way when there was a breakdown in her team by one of the team members, she was able to show up, understand, support, and in that way help the person bounce back quicker. As she said is to me later, I never thought that softness is so important for leadership, but I realize now that I am able to do things that I was not able to do before and I have gained more respect from my team. They were still hitting those sales goals but while making sure there is well being.
It’s hard to be a good listener. We are programmed to want to talk, and to share. It takes effort to stop and to listen. But anyone who has achieved great success will tell you that listening is such an important quality to have. What are some ways that influential people have learned to listen, to succeed both personally and professionally? As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Chen Lizra.
Chen Lizra, one of the foremost somatic healing experts in the world, has honed her skills and practices in the genre of body healing for over two decades. From spending nearly two decades intensively training with Cuba’s top professional dancers, learning Cuban embodiment practices, training for over two years in transformational coaching on how to heal trauma and generational trauma naturally from the body through somatic practices, to studying Zen meditation practices and Buddhist living in Japan under the guidance of Gudo Nishijima, Chen’s expansive life experiences have supplied her with transformational wisdom on how to heal and grow through embodiment. She’s taken that embodied wisdom and developed the Power of Somatic Intelligence, an innovative treatment to heal, through movement and through being deeply felt, the traumas trapped in the body.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
I had a very complicated childhood. I had a loving mom and dad that got divorced. My mom got mentally sick when I was 11 years old and she crashed emotionally. My whole life came crashing down on me without any skills for coping with any of what was going on. Growing up around a mentally ill mom broke the core of my emotional foundation — trust in people, ability to show vulnerability, having healthy boundaries, and so much more. I was depressed, I lived for 10 years with suicidal thoughts. It took a lot of hard work and 2.5 decades to find my way out of this dark hole and to rebuild my emotional foundation getting to ‘spectacular,’ to the point that I now guide others through the internal emotional journey to powerful breakthroughs and how to live an amazing and meaningful life of impact, healing, and joy.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“You can’t find what you want because like most people you don’t believe that you can have what you want.” — This was said to me by my dear late friend — Rob Stewart. I was looking for my ‘why’ at the time for a whole year, and could not find it. He said it to me when I didn’t understand why I wasn’t finding my why, and realizing what it meant changed my life forever. As a result, I decided to have what I want which is what I do today — my calling. But most of us are so busy making excuses of why we can’t have what we want — I don’t have a degree, I don’t have the experience, who will let me do this… that we are our own self-sabotagers on our own path to greatness blocking ourselves from living our best life.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
A United Kingdom (2016) — the choices that the King of Botswana makes in the movie and the values he stood by (that now feel like they are gone from this world) are what true leadership is in my opinion. This movie inspired me so much and resonated with me so deeply that I watched it 3 times. He was a maverick — he lived not according to what was expected of him but according to what he felt was right. And he led by example. All things that I believe in and believe we need more of these days.
Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. Let’s begin with a definition of terms so that each of us and our readers are on the same page. What exactly does being a good listener mean?
Great question! Being a good listener requires active listening and feeling the other. What do I mean by this? We can hear the words of what the person says, and we can feel what the other person says. When the person feels felt it’s a whole other level of listening and connection. Someone might scream and get angry, and you can get reactive and attack back. Or you can zoom out for a second and realize the person is angry and make room for this anger and acknowledge it. This will actually calm down the person in front of you. People repeat “I don’t feel seen.” What they mean to say is “I don’t feel felt.” When we feel felt — like the other feels us — there is a deeper resonance and relating that happens. You create deeper and more meaningful connections, you get noticed as a leader, a partner, or a parent. It’s a skill we are losing these days due to overthinking and disconnecting from our emotions and our bodies. We live absent from our bodies and disconnected from ourselves.
Why is effective listening such an important quality? Can you give a story or example to explain what you mean?
I wouldn’t call it effective listening. I would call it active listening. We are paying attention not just to the words but also to the energy of the person, and the environment around us at the same time. There is what goes on inside me and what goes on outside of me. So, for example, a person might say “I don’t know how this will work out, and maybe I can change this and do this, or maybe I can talk to so and so…” on the surface you might get stuck thinking of how to fix the situation (and there is nothing wrong with finding solutions) but the immediate need is to deal with the emotion. The person is creating strategies because they are worried and scared. They are trying to create safety. I might say to the person — “I get that you are worried and maybe even feeling fear in this situation, can we just slow down for a moment and acknowledge this and be with this.” I would then feel with the person their fear. This will calm down their nervous system. They will feel felt, seen, and heard. It stops the overtalking. Once they calm down, we can address the problem, but first and foremost we need to handle their emotions.
When a person talks too much and too fast — what I call emotionally vomiting on the other — something got triggered. At times a trauma is in the background. Many people are disconnected from what they feel, they overthink, and are disembodied. This causes a disconnect in communication. We are responding to the symptoms and not the root cause. It’s hard as a listener to be with the other person when they are triggered and many times, we do not identify the root cause. The experience of the triggered person is of not being heard and seen.
When we are embodied, we speak from a grounded more connected place that’s deep inside, and the pace is slower. There are less words and more presence. It’s easier for us to feel connected to the person, and the person feels more heard and seen.
From your experience or perspective, what are some of the common barriers that hold someone back from being a good listener?
Great question! To name the most common ones:
As I work with clients, the work always starts with noticing that they are spending too much time in the mind thinking, not feeling enough, and as a result losing presence and connection. If we are in our heads all the time, we cannot hear the other person because we cannot feel them. When we are not in our bodies feeling and sensing, we are disembodied, which makes it hard for us to relate to the other. One of the most common ways we stop being present is when we numb our own emotions by focusing on distractions, such as drugs, alcohol, shopping, emotional eating… we escape our own feelings. When we meet someone else’s emotions, we meet our own emotional edge. If I cannot be with myself, I certainly cannot be with you. Add to this the narrative added — when we escape to our mind, we make up stories, interpretations. For example, you might be sad and I might interpret it to mean something about me, I then project this story onto the situation and you. Now there is a filter impacting our communication, distorting what we each hear.
There is so much more, yet this is a good start. The key to good communication is developing high self awareness — the ability to zoom out and see a different perspective, and the bigger picture, while self-managing our own automated responses.
Can you please share a few practical techniques that have helped you become a better listener a more effective listener?
Yes, of course… here are some examples:
I make sure to meditate every day, even if it’s just 10 minutes. This grounds me and brings me back to the present moment. It allows me to pay attention to what I feel without being attached to my emotions which brings about a sense of calm. Meditation can be by sitting on a cushion but can also be a time spent in nature connecting with mother earth.
I focus a lot on the ability to feel the other, what we call the felt experience. When we can feel the other there is a resonance that’s calming and that allows us to be deeply related. Think of a time when you felt sad, did you want someone to tell you how to “fix it” or did you just need a hug? What will make you feel better — you telling the other all that is on your heart and them saying “I get it, that’s hard,” or them trying to give you advice right away? When we feel felt we feel heard and seen.
There are many more but let me give you a final example: our embodiment — closing the gap between our inner and outer world. I can behave confidently but if my posture shows self-doubt and fear, what I am communicating will not land confidently. The way we carry ourselves, our embodiment, affects how we feel about ourselves and the results in our lives. How we embody ourselves impacts how we listen to others too because our embodiment is the sum of all our experiences.
Here is the central question of our discussion. What are five ways that listening effectively actively can help someone succeed personally and professionally? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.
Absolutely, it helps on so many levels, to summarize it, here are the top 5. It helps to:
1 . Become a better leader in your professional life — I worked with a client of mine who is a sales director on her presence and compassion. She leads a whole sales team and used to be very much about sales goals. What she realized from doing this work is that she needed to feel her team, and this way when there was a breakdown in her team by one of the team members, she was able to show up, understand, support, and in that way help the person bounce back quicker. As she said is to me later, I never thought that softness is so important for leadership, but I realize now that I am able to do things that I was not able to do before and I have gained more respect from my team. They were still hitting those sales goals but while making sure there is well being.
2 . Have more influence power — I worked with someone in a company that’s very male dominated. When we started working together, she wasn’t taken seriously in the company. We worked hard through coaching for her to develop new skills. She learned to show up where she used to get emotional and be connected to her emotions (as women are) and yet use it as an advantage. She would speak up and would be told: “You are too emotional.” In the past, she would shrink and feel unheard. But as we healed her trauma from her body and I helped her develop stronger communication skills, she would respond: “No, I am just passionate about what I am just saying because I am seeing you make a mistake and I feel I have to make you aware of it.” Within a few months she got promoted and had major breakthroughs in her career.
3 . Having more resilience when meeting challenges — A problem that was MOST common, that most people can relate to that occurred as a result of the COVID lock downs, was that most people were either completely isolated or all of a sudden had to spend so much time together in a tight space 24/7. It was overwhelming. A lot of suppressed and unprocessed trauma came to the surface leading to conflicts and breakdowns. People got to the edge of being able to feel. This led to relationships falling apart, depression, suicidal thoughts, heightened anxiety, and other mental health issues. A lot of people I worked with faced these types of challenges and lacked emotional resilience and the ability to process emotions in a healthy way. I was busier than ever. I wanted to help as many people as possible because so many people needed it. Since I could only work personally with a few people per month, I was trying to come up with a solution to help more people. As a result, I developed a one of a kind program, the Emotional Resilience Essentials program, which brings this wisdom and impact of my one-on-one coaching to as many people as possible. We now live in a world that is more challenging and changing than ever. The aim of this program is to equip people with practical emotional skills that develop a solid unshakable core, or in other words to make them more emotionally resilient. It is essential for our societies. Our societies are infested with traumas that get transferred from generation to generation. 70% of adults in the modern world have suffered trauma. It is up to us now to focus part of our energy on our healing so we can heal humanity, our communities, and families.
4 . Be a better parent or partner — a client of mine used to get very triggered by his wife. She would always fight with him about the scheduling of the kids. They were a blended family and managing everyone required planning. As soon as he would land at home, she would be all over the scheduling and they would fight. He just wanted her to give him room to breathe. He learned to get softer, feel her distress, acknowledge it, and reassure her that they will handle it but to give him time to land first. From being reactive and snapping, he went into containing and diffusing. Their relationship improved tenfold.
5 . Help others heal and grow — we don’t think of ourselves as healers, but we have this natural capacity. My grandma had the ability to feel me deeply and while I was deeply wounded by my mom’s mental illness, she would spend time with me and feel me, be with me. She was my lighthouse, my belief that there was something better than what I was experiencing, that more was available to me. When I hold space for my clients to help them heal from trauma, I hold this kind of emotional unconditional space for them. The beauty of this process is that as they heal, they become that for others. A client of mine said she was doing it with her daughter in law when she felt she needed it the most. Many other clients — men and women alike — report that they are able to show up for their loved ones or employees in ways they were not able to themselves and help them move through something.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Having gone through such hardships in life and since it took me 25 years to figure out how to heal such deep trauma and get to a phenomenal place. I know that this wisdom is not common sense, and it needs to be the status quo in every family, community, and society. We cannot keep living the way we do. Look at the state of the world, nature, families, and world leadership. We are destroying the world around us and something very bad is happening in the world in the past few years. For us to survive, and not just survive, but to thrive, we need to live embodied and tapped into this inner wisdom. I also believe that it should not take anyone 25 years like it took me. And when I work with clients, I show them how to do it in 3–6 months.
And for that exactly I launched the Somatic Intelligence Wisdom Academy https://siwisdomacademy.com/. THE go-to online learning membership and community for discovering cutting-edge somatic practices, and deep and ancient wisdom, designed explicitly for change-makers who want to activate their highest potential by working through the body. This is for anyone wanting to learn the HOW-TO live it — how to create this powerful shift in your life.
We have programs with me and world-renowned mentors that teach confidence, developing emotional resilience, embodying femininity, breathwork, developing the skill of feeling others, embodiment practices, and so much more. My vision is to make this embodied wisdom widely accessible so we can see a massive shift in how people live life.
Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have lunch with, and why? Maybe we can tag them and see what happens!
Jay Shetty — I love how he made wisdom go viral. As someone who lived in a Zen dojo in Japan and a Tibetan silent monastery in Canada, I get where he is coming from and love his work. I think that our work overlaps in so many ways. It would be intriguing to sit for lunch together and just share.
How can our readers continue to follow your work online?
By joining our mailing list at www.powerofsomaticintelligence.com, on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@ChenLizra/videos -on Instagram www.instagram.com/clizra.
And finally if you wish to learn more about this movement, the SI Wisdom Academy — https://siwisdomacademy.com. It comes with a community component which is a safe emotional container for growth, healing, and deep connections. We don’t just offer programs, we are with you every step of the way for weekly support, live classes and more. The members are like no other. We call it the SI family.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
About the Interviewer: Douglas E. Noll, JD, MA was born nearly blind, crippled with club feet, partially deaf, and left-handed. He overcame all of these obstacles to become a successful civil trial lawyer. In 2000, he abandoned his law practice to become a peacemaker. His calling is to serve humanity, and he executes his calling at many levels. He is an award-winning author, teacher, and trainer. He is a highly experienced mediator. Doug’s work carries him from international work to helping people resolve deep interpersonal and ideological conflicts. Doug teaches his innovative de-escalation skill that calms any angry person in 90 seconds or less. With Laurel Kaufer, Doug founded Prison of Peace in 2009. The Prison of Peace project trains life and long terms incarcerated people to be powerful peacemakers and mediators. He has been deeply moved by inmates who have learned and applied deep, empathic listening skills, leadership skills, and problem-solving skills to reduce violence in their prison communities. Their dedication to learning, improving, and serving their communities motivates him to expand the principles of Prison of Peace so that every human wanting to learn the skills of peace may do so. Doug’s awards include California Lawyer Magazine Lawyer of the Year, Best Lawyers in America Lawyer of the Year, Purpose Prize Fellow, International Academy of Mediators Syd Leezak Award of Excellence, National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals Neutral of the Year. His four books have won a number of awards and commendations. Doug’s podcast, Listen With Leaders, is now accepting guests. Click on this link to learn more and apply.
