Contemplare Meliora

“Trust grows when you take time to understand the thoughts and feelings of others before you act.”

So starts the third chapter of The Right Honourable David Johnston’s book Trust: Twenty Ways to Build a Better Country. He continues:

My grandmother told me that people were given two ears and just one mouth for a good reason: we should listen before we speak. She was a wise woman and an early proponent of what we refer to now as emotional intelligence. While that term gets bandied about quite a bit these days, emotional intelligence at its core is the simple act of listening to and empathizing with another person—and using that listening and empathizing to inform your decisions and actions.

His Excellency’s motto as Governor General was Contemplare Meliora – To envisage a better world – and this book is an surprisingly useful guide to doing just that.