This is a note about peoples’ sharing re their listening experiences between Parts I and II of the workshop, before we got into the “Speaking Turn” side of things last night.  My favorite part of this work, by far, is listening to peoples’ testimonies about what’s been working or not as they practice with listening.

I want to raise a cautionary red flag about your attempts at listening. Please consider that “taking on” listening as a daily practice in our non-listening culture (Dan didn’t see any listening out there with anyone) is much more difficult than you think it is.  Really.  This is going into the belly of the beast.  I mean who is plugged in enough to listen to “party chatter” at a barbecue?  The tiniest successes have to be acknowleged for what they are, as true miracles. 

So when I coached Coz that she wasn’t listening to her guests’ sharings, and she “got it” immediately without being defensive, that is a success. Or, if you realize after a conversation that you didn’t listen, that is a major success. It is a huge accomplishment to realize after the fact, that you might have had a whole conversation without listening to someone.  That realization is the success in learning how to listen.  Give yourself a pat on the back for the awareness, and just work on having it sooner and sooner in conversations. 

Look at the supremely difficult conversation Mary was in with her co-teacher about the “missing” child. So much was going on for Mary, especially that she has a certain responsibility as age-group leader for the staff, and she actually tried to listen!  Imagine that.  Her listening might not have been the best, so she didn’t get the “Yes,” and she remembered to be a listener!  I say, WOW, for that.  GO MARY!  What an amazing success that was.  So I saddened myself listening to Mary seeing her interaction as a failure.  Please, please remember how difficult this is.  And Dave and Elisabeth — imagine being able, even for a short time, to be able to be as generous as they were with each other within an otherwise not-so-hot conversation with so much at stake?  I say that was INCREDIBLE! 

Please acknowledge every awareness, every tiny step forward, for exactly what it is — a miracle on the path.  Thank you for your energy and your intentionality around this work.  I am thrilled to be part of this new conversation.  Thank you, Stephen, for seeing the worth and creating Salon for our practicing.  Thank you Rula for pushing Stephen to create that.  Thank you Coz for supporting me to bring this brilliant stuff out of my closet.  It’s so clear to me that every one of us is a contribution to to what we have and where we are headed.  Thank you all who participated in our first “Where Love Lives: Fear-Less Conversation.”

 In gratitude and love, Ed

Good morning!  Whew, I am still full from our conversation yesterday — as if I overate a delicious meal.  Thank you all so much for participating with so much honesty and openness  — it was wonderful to see everyone so comfortable with each other in so short a time.

Interesting about the “honesty.”  I had the good fortune of having Jason and Katie sleeping at my house Friday and Saturday evenings.  I told Katie this morning that I believed her opening comment in introducing herself as “…5 months sober” set the tone for our entire group for the day.

Then I was having a conversation with Katie and Jason about sobriety and my own addictions, because I wanted their advice (which, of course, they weren’t allowed to give!) and an amazing conversation developed out of Jason listening to me.  I’ll share that in another blog entry.  I had 2 very powerful new learnings about listening.  I keep being amazed at how much I keep learning, every day, about something I know so much about.

Anyway, thank you all for engaging in the listening conversation with me and Coz.  It was a day that was everything I dreamed it could be — and more.  I can’t wait for our Thursday evening session to find out how things are going for you, and I can’t wait to be in an on-going blog conversation with all of you who are moved to participate, and I can’t wait for the next “Where Love Lives” workshop.  Thank you for helping me make my dream come true.  Dan, if you are reading this, I know it won’t mean much to you until I write either my Listening book, or my My Body-Your Body book, and having you at the workshop will live inside of me forever.  I’m so grateful to have you in my life, much less as my son.  How can’t I be grateful every second of my life for that? I love you more and more every day.

Hope to hear from some of you.  Good luck.  If blogging isn’t your cup of tea, and you’d like to continue the Listening conversation and your experiences with me via email, that would be great.  Just write to me, and if something seems worth sharing with the others on the blog, I would ask your permission.

Clint Eastwood used to say in his movies to the bad guys who were considering fighting him, “Go ahead. Make my day.”  Your coming to the workshop not only made day, it made my life.

Ed

Ed and I were at someone’s house last night, planning a local listening workshop.  We were trying to find a title for the training that would capture the magic of the moment that occurs not just for the speaker when she is really heard, but for the listener even more.  It’s difficult to put into words, but i’m going to try now.

When I censor my automatic “14 non-listening reactions” (http://www.lisbepartners.com/content/view/what-listening-is-not.html) and wait for the speaker to finish, I let go of my opinions and instead, stay with the speaker by helping her arrive at her own conclusion–even though it is often obvious to any listener what the “right” conclusion should be.

So many times I have felt such impatience, because the solution is so apparent to me.  I don’t want to stay and wait for the other to finish.  I want to reach a conclusion, get consensus, and move ON.  But to experience the magical kind of listening requires patience and suspension of my agenda and judgments.  Sort of like good sex:  the caring partner waits until his lover is ready; it’s not just about him and his needs; after all, conversation, like sex, is social intercourse:  it takes two.

When i have waited for and coached the other within his framework, the rewards have catapulted me to a completely unexpected place.  I’m one of those women who don’t like emotional exchanges.  I don’t cry.  I’m not interested in other people’s dramas; I’m bored with my own.  I have no interest, even, in helping people resolve anything.  I refer them to good therapists.

The first time Ed coached me in listening 3 years ago, I listened to a friend whom I had issues with.  Ed advised me to have him speak first, even though i was the one with the problem; that way, he’d not be as defensive.  Well, 3 hours later, my friend was still talking.  He opened up to me his vision, his dream of starting a journal, etc.  I–the ice princess–was actually brought to tears.  I felt the resentment melt away (it became less & less personal; it sort of became abstract then evaporated).  I suddenly felt “human”–i.e., vulnerable, humbled, not as judgmental or certain about my opinions.  I was in a shaky, new and unexpected place, where the next moment was totally unpredictable.

The other times i’ve had magical moments were again, more about me than the speaker:  in granting the speaker the space to expand her thoughts, I’m empowering myself at another level.  I feel more like a leader, someone with class, when I allow the other to be the focus of attention.

Kathleen

It is becoming clearer to me that one of the biggest problems for people re listening, is that they do not recognize, as I see it, a person’s ‘red’ in most conversations.  ‘Red,’ or a show of emotion, is usually not as obvious as this:

It’s usually more just an inflection on a word, or a facial expression.  We can watch for it whether we are speaking and someone is reacting, or we are just listening to someone who begins to talk to us.  I cannot emphasize enough how critical it is to continually ask the question, “Who’s got the ‘red?”

The man who first identified the normal, human reactive responses was Thomas Gordon.  He called them, in his seminal work “Parent Effectiveness Training” the 12 barriers or roadblocks to communication.  See http://www.gordontraining.com/

Often, a speaker reaches a different place of understanding inside him/herself after having had a chance to speak with the help of a good listener.  Does action result from that new place?  It is a key “so what?” question about listening.  Was the listening simply a nice exercise for the speaker, a “feel good?”  Or was the self-expression meaningful in the sense that the speaker’s opportunity to find or to clear up something important will lead to action?

Ed

I just returned from the gathering where the family received the friends and community.  At the end of the line was a young teenage girl who I didn’t recognize.  She held out her hand and introduced herself to me, “I’m Kate, Peter’s oldest daughter.”  I looked into her eyes, and the enormity of the loss washed over me.  I just looked at Kate for a moment, and feeling totally lost about it all in my own heart and spirit as I stood in front of her, saying nothing I hugged her.  Sometimes that’s the best or only listening you can do.

Ed

I am going to a funeral today.  Sudden death of a young (that words is relative coming from a 65 year old) man who was one of the most well-respected, most loved members of our community here in Ithaca, New York.  He was up cutting a tree and fell.

What does one say to someone who has experienced such a loss?  “I understand.”  “I’m sorry.” “At least he was in our lives for a time” ” He gave so much to so many — you must be so proud and grateful for who he was.”  None of that works, of course.  What do you say to his wife, his two young children, his dozens of brothers and sisters in the extended family?  What do you say to help with the grief of the hundreds or thousands of people who knew him?

I assert that all we can do is listen.  What else is there to do but to understand.  Understanding is the help, not trying to find something to say to make someone feel better.  Being listened to, and being understood is what helps someone in grief.  It sure might not feel that way sometimes, especially if they start to cry even harder.  So sometimes listening becomes a counter-intuitive act of faith — believing that something is right even while it doesn’t fix something up, make things happy.

What has to come out of our mouths, then, to someone who is grieving such a loss has to be something like, “You probably can’t even describe this loss in words” “Must be so hard to even think of going on without him” “All of a sudden, he’s gone” “What a ripping out of such a huge piece of your life” “You don’t care why it happened or how it happened — you just want to take back that it happened.” “It’s all got to feel unreal to you right now, that it didn’t really happen.” “You don’t see how you are going to go on without him.” “You don’t want to go on without him.”  Anything like that which we feel in your heart-of-hearts is what the person might be experiencing.

Fixing up and making happy is to help our own feelings, not the feelings of the person in grief.  It is not so easy to be in the presence of another’s pain.  We want to get rid of it.  But that is not to help them, it is to help us.  Listening is not about us.  Listening is about being in the service of the speaker.  That is the gift.

Ed

“Restorative Justice” is a relatively new concept in the criminal justice system.  The offender and a member of the victim’s family sit across a table from one another, usually many years after the crime.  The purpose is to help the victim restore some sense of sanity to his/her life after the devastating loss.

I watched the process on a program called “Face to Face” on MSNBC, where a 37 year old man faced the sister of man he senselessy and without provocation murdered 21 years ago.  I was struck by a strong, absolute emptiness present in that conversation.  There was nothing the offender could say that would leave the victim feeling “understood.”  What do you say to the sister of a man you shot and killed when you were 16 years old just because you felt like acting out the inner violence you felt and wanted to express?

He was pretty quiet as she spoke and asked him questions like “Why?” “What were you feeling in school that day knowing what you were about to do?” “How do you kill someone you don’t even know?” “What do you think about every year on January 16?”

Sometimes this process is transformative for either or both victim and offender.  In this case it wasn’t.  The sister maintained a fierce anger about who the killer was and what he did.  As I watched the process I realized that the best the offender could do in that case was to listen.  Even that wouldn’t make a difference, but at least the victim might have some sense of being understood.  Maybe listening for a few minutes in a conversation like that would be the start of something that could take years, if ever, to accomplish.  It just all seemed so hopeless to me.

What can we do to heal the regular relationships in our lives where there has been some kind of emotional murder?  Can listening be an opening to reach all the hurt and pain?  And if it could, what would it require from the person (in this case the murderer) to listen, and only listen,  when he/she has so many feelings to express as well?  Whew.

Ed

I just had a fascinating conversation with the Program Director of a local childcare center in Ithaca.  We were talking about the listening and the speaking turns, and about a goal of getting her staff at the school to  listen . . . . all the time — whether it is to an angry parent or to a distressed 4 year old or to each other during staff meetings or to a spouse at home.

Understanding the concept, she asked thoughtfully, “Can we become too conscious?”  She mentioned two friends of hers, a married couple who are totally committed to being responsible communicators to each other and to their professional clients, and to being conscious and present in their lives in each moment.  She said her friends are never “off.”  They prepare and plan their difficult conversations.  They are respectful all the time no matter who is talking to whom or about what is being said.  She said she can almost hear their minds going “CLICK-Step #1, CLICK-Step #2, CLICK-Step #3″ whenever she speaks with either of them about anything.

She said it’s a little disconcerting, and her question to me was about the possibility of life becoming too methodical with such a high commitment to conscious communication.  Is there any fun in that?  Is there joy present if the emotions are so tightly under control?  What if we got every staff member at the school to operate at that high level of consciousness with each other all the time?  Imagine anger always being dealt with productively and cleanly.  Imagine no sniping behind peoples’ backs.  Imagine speaking directly to people about their problem behavior and not having to deal with their defensiveness and reactivity?

Would that be boring?  Lifeless?  Empty?  Or would it be delightful and incredible?

Ed