The Art of Listening
Comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell suggests there are three ways to approach the mystery of life:
You can affirm all that the world is.
You can reject all that it is, or,
You can affirm it when it gets to be the way you want.
How you listen to others is always somehow wrapped up in this. Often our stance is affirming, rejecting or moving to change what we are hearing. Listening well is a practice of affirmation of the other person, and being open to being changed by the message they are giving.
Listening always happens from a position or place in our social field. A perspective. Perspective shapes everything we can know. We can be subject to it - unaware of how we are being shaped; or we can hold it as often helpful, but always incomplete.
Often, we arrive at our conversations with others with the burden of agenda or the hurt from a long past conflict. We listen out of habit and not out of a sense of respect and presence.
Conversational leadership starts with tuning in and listening differently and more deeply than you would normally. Initial steps are about becoming still, exploring, discovering and uncovering that which you may have missed before.
We have so much interference and things competing for our attention. Amidst the noise we need to develop our capacity for awareness of other’s speaking styles. Are we aligning the right parts of ourselves to what is needed in the different relationships and interactions we have? Are we truly focusing and looking past the distractions of daily life and the moment to tune in?
We can’t always listen with our whole - embodied - self, it would be truly exhausting and an unrealistic expectation. But knowing when it’s time to tune in more deeply or when we are reacting out of a sense of not being fully present to the people we are with is key for any kind of positive change - transformational or otherwise.
Otto Scharmer’s popular work on the four levels of listening is helpful in guiding our listening practice.
The Four Levels of Listening:
We listen out of habit - When we listen at this level, we make judgements about what matches our level of knowing. When we reach any kind of agreement from this level it is really just about what you already know. Here, our language is dull and our attention diffused.
We listen for ‘facts’ - When we listen at this level, we are paying attention to differences. We are largely remaining on the outside - firmly in our own view. This is similar to our habitual level, but here we are more critically attending to what confirms or disconfirms what we already believe. This might be to evaluate if we think the speaker is reasonable or not. It’s easier to dismiss than to engage, so often we are listening to find out if we can be dismissive or if our point is proven or not.
A level of listening we evolve for our more caring relationships is one where we begin to listen with empathy. Here we can find some level of emotional connection and take on the other’s perspective. In a sense, we inhabit the others’ way of thinking. We step outside of ourselves and suspend our own judgements. Realizing that their position might be our own if we arrived in the moment with their past experiences and not our own.
The fourth kind of listening is listening from the future. Sometimes this is called listening from the source or generative listening. Here, we inhabit an imaginative world of what is possible for us, for our family or community or our organization. This level of listening only begins to be possible as your sense of self is expansive enough to hold multiple possible futures - you know who you are so you aren’t over identified with only one path forward. Great coaches listen to your current struggles in terms of noticing the arrival of your future possibility.
To get to this fourth level of listening we must navigate our own blindspots and engage actively in our own development. But blindspots are not just blindspots are they? They are our own voices that crowd out whoever we are trying to listen to. Our own voices of judgement, cynicism, and fear. They can be very powerful - holding us back from really connecting with ourselves and with others.
Listening well is a skill we can all learn and develop within ourselves that enables us to bring forward provocative and important questions. Listening well helps us develop deeper understandings of various perspectives and reach a fuller appreciation for what diverse views bring to situations. Listening, when carried out well, can lead to better, more sustainable solutions, growth, team synergy and collaboration.
““To listen is very hard, because it asks of us so much interior stability that we no longer need to prove ourselves by speeches, arguments, statements or declarations. True listeners no longer have an inner need to make their presence known. They are free to receive, welcome, to accept.” ”
Erich Fromm’s classic rules of listening is a great place to start -
Quoted::
The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.
Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.
He must possess a freely working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.
He must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his own.
The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love. To understand another means to love (them).
Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.
