Listening

Years ago, when I first met Ed, I became intrigued and inspired by the listening method he espouses when I saw the result of it in a conversation we arranged  with “Tom,” a man with whom I’d had problems for years.  I was certain that my assessment of Tom was correct, especially since several of my friends had the same view of him.  Assuring me that he would coach me in my listening, Ed suggested that I meet with Tom, and that I primarily listen rather than speak. I was skeptical and reluctant, but gave it a try.

As we drove to the meeting, Ed suggested that I initiate the conversation with my SPEAKING turn, but to keep it very brief — no more than one or two sentences, because Tom would already be reacting either in his head or out loud to me — and then to shift to a LISTENING turn for as long as it took for him to express his reaction.  Why continue speaking if he wasn’t going to hear anything I said?  That made sense to me in terms of understanding the two fundamental Conscious Conversations questions: (1) Whose turn is it to SPEAK or to LISTEN? and (2) Who’s got the ‘red?’ Initially, I have the ‘he talked for over 2 hoursred’ so I start the conversation.  Immediately, he has the ‘red’ in reaction, so then I need to shift to listening.  

That is exactly how it played out.  After briefly opening the conversation, and keeping my own ‘red’ in check, I just let Tom react, and talk about the issue from his perspective.  I listened as he talked for over 2 hours, becoming more and more animated and inspired by the ideas that were coming out of his mouth.  I’ve known Tom for over 35 years and this was the first time i saw him so inspired.  I could hear his “humanity,” so to speak; instead of just his shortcomings.  I was moved by his emotion (which seldom happens to me).

By the end of his speaking, i didn’t need to say a word.  It was all complete for me.  To this day, there is no more resentment in me about Tom.  After that evening, i was hooked on the possibilities of listening in a different way–to suspend or censor my own reactions & judgments in order to create a safe space for the other person to draw out their buried grief, hopes or dreams.

-Kathleen

As an end in itself, listening becomes simply a technique.  It might look good, and make people feel good, but what is accomplished?  We can say to ourselves, Wow, I listened great, yet it seems much more is required — some kind of action connected with what we are understanding often seems required.  If we are not moved to action I’m not sure we can say that we really understand.  It’s easy for listening to remain an intellectual exercise.

Example:  Years ago, standing on the sidelines with other parents watching our kids’ baseball game,  I  listened with appropriate feedback (e.g. So, it’s hard to see him standing out there, the only one on the field without a glove) to a woman feeling bad about not being able to afford to buy a glove for her son.  A few minutes later, feeling self-satisfied with my listening, I moved away from her to attend to something else. Awhile later, a friend who witnessed my exchange with the woman came over to me and said, Ed, you might be interested in what happened after you left that woman whose son didn’t have a glove.  Remember the man who was standing on the other side of her?  After you listened and left, he handed her $30.

I’ve never forgotten that incident.  I “listened” as a technique, but that man was the one who really heard her. Can we listen, and say we understand, and not take action on what we hear?  Have we really understood if we are not moved to action?

Ed

The red and green lights are a metaphor, they are not necessarily a rule.  The “green light” in a conversation, for instance,  is a cue that indicates the speaker is probably finished speaking. Usually, it is shown by the speaker saying some form of “Yes,” and nothing more, in response to my listening feedback:

e.g. “Exactly” or “Right” or “That’s it” or “No, I didn’t” or perhaps an affirmative head nod.

The “green light” is only an indicator. It is not an automatic clue to begin taking my turn to speak — OK, I did my listening. Now I get to talk.  See post, “How long to listen?”

Standing outside the polling place talking with a few friends, we were approached by a man who started muttering angrily to us about how Obama wanted to shut down all the coal mines, and what a jerk he was.  I immediately took in what he looked like, guessed why he was talking to us, and concluded that there would be little hope in telling him he had the wrong context about Obama’s coal comment.  He didn’t like Obama, and would use any information he had to support that stand.  Facts to the contrary would most likely have little impact.  This 3-second assessment told me all of our time would be better served by walking away.

My friends began to react to him.  I don’t think it was a conscious choice.  I was feeling the same agenda they were pushing — to influence him and to change his mind — I just didn’t think a speaking turn would be helpful at that point.  I watched their exchange for a moment or two, adding in a few listening responses like, “So, you basically believe Obama is a jerk.”

He’d nod at me and then go back to the argument with the others.  So, the question I’m left with is, “How does one influence someone who wants to believe something that may have no factual basis in reality?” Is it even possible?

My conclusion, so far, is that nothing can happen without the willingness to first listen.  It seems logical:  why should someone listen to me when I’m not willing to listen to him/her?  Yet, we’re all trying to convince each other of our ‘rightness.’ In a situation like this, for example, with a person holding strong political beliefs, it seems I could listen for a few minutes and really try to understand what I believe is an insane and totally ‘wrong’ point of view.  “So, that comment about the coal really convinced you that Obama isn’t someone whose values you can support.”  “It seems like no matter what anyone would tell you about Obama, even a fact that made sense to you, you won’t change your mind. You want to dislike Obama, no matter what.”

That’s what I was hearing in his speaking, so that would have been my listening feedback — to his process more than to his content.

If I can manage to withhold my own point of view for a few minutes, I might actually be able understand this person  and he would feel understood.  What other path is there to begin a successful communication?  Who’s willing to listen first?  After listening, and getting his “Yes,” I would have a chance to say, “Here’s something I know about Obama that might make sense to you.  Remember how he ________ ?” The man would most likely go off on me again.  And if I was willing, consciously to stay with the process, I would listen again, and the communication cycle would be repeated, with me giving up a lot of airtime.  After 10 or 20 minutes, we might have the start of a productive conversation.

What if this was a spouse, and I disagreed just as vehemently as I did with this stranger?  If I have the skills of Conscious Conversation, am I willing to listen without being listened to in return?  This is just the reality of life on the planet.  People don’t know how to listen.  We don’t value it enough to teach it in our schools, and few teachers are skillful listeners, themselves, so where will people learn how to do it? People don’t know how to do it, much less want to do it.  Given that reality, what am I willing to do?

Ed

I had an upsetting wake-up call last night about the skills.  Looking back on my behavior at a meeting I am pretty embarrassed by my yelling, cutting people off, shaking my head, not looking at the people who were trying to explain their point of view, etc.  I acted that way for the entire 2 hours of the meeting, and I was still upset as people left.  And I didn’t care.

I was furious at the 4 other people because I knew I was ‘right’ about my argument (as many of us feel in situations of disagreement where there is a lot at stake).  The result I was trying to achieve meant a lot to me, and I believed it was necessary for the future health of our organization.  I was angry because one person said nothing, and the other three seemed to be trying to hedge instead of saying a hard truth about an important Resolution we were writing.

I realized afterward that the only real problem was that I wasn’t ‘on the balcony.’  I just wanted what I wanted, as did everyone else.  I was in the conversation, on ‘the stage.’ I know that doesn’t work, especially with strong emotions present.  Even after 30+ years of practice with the skills, I can’t access when I’m not “on the balcony.”

I’m not sure what I’d have done if I had been ‘on the balcony.’  I really didn’t want to hear what I was hearing.  To listen would have required a real faith in the skills, to use them when I didn’t feel like it.  All I know is that without listening, from me or from anyone else at the meeting, it degenerated into a fiasco that left no one feeling good about our result.  So I think we have to listen when we don’t want to in cases like this, and that requires (1) being ‘on the balcony,’ and (2) having faith in the listening process beyond our current feelings.  This doesn’t seem easy to me, and I don’t know what works better.

Ed

Point: Listening, and understanding what is really going on for a speaker, can make listeners  uncomfortable enough to want to run away.

Example:  I was having lunch one day with 5 participants from a “**People Skills” workshop.  One of the women started to talk about her unhappiness with the feedback she received from a profile instrument.  She was distressed because she had done a lot of work on herself over the past few years, and the profile indicated that her behavior with others evidenced the same negative characteristics she thought she had left behind years ago.  One of the people at the table began to reassure her (non-listening response #11), and another began to diagnose (#4) the situation.  I stopped them, and coached them to try listening as this issue seemed very important to Grace, the woman speaking about it.

So, we all began to listen, and as we did, Grace became more and more distressed about her failure at becoming a “nicer” person.  She didn’t understand the feedback she had received and was very confused about what it meant.  We kept listening with feedback, for example: So, this profile tells you that all the work you’ve done on yourself hasn’t made any difference.  And now you don’t even know who you are. w  As we listened, she began to cry.  We kept listening: “What a disappointment (that feedback was) for you.”

The other people at the table were doing great, and I could see they were becoming more and more uncomfortable with Grace’s mounting distress.  Listening to the energy I was feeling from them, I said, “You all seem uncomfortable, I think because Grace doesn’t seem to be any happier with your listening.  In fact, she seems to be feeling worse. I suggested about the process to that point, It’s OK.  Listening isn’t about making a person feel better, it’s about understanding wherever they are, and helping them to understand where they are.  You’re doing great.

Grace talked some more about her pain, crying softly, and the people continued to listen although they were all becoming more and more stressed.  Part of their discomfort came, I think, from listening to strong emotions coming from a person who they all knew as strong, confident, purposeful, assertive, etc.  They didn’t know what to do with this change in character.  One person at the table who happened to be Grace’s boss, said, as all this was going on, I feel so helpless. Listening to that, I said to him, You want to do something, you want to make her feel better. Grace’s boss said, Yes, and I said, There’s nothing more you can do than exactly what you are doing.  Listening doesn’t necessarily feel as good as giving advice, and it’s much more effective.  Life isn’t like a TV program that gets wrapped up in 23.5 minutes, give or take a few commercials.  This is the best we can do for Grace, and she’ll be working on this for awhile as she tries to piece things together. At least we are allowing her space to think and to feel what she is feeling.  We are showing great respect for her intelligence and strength to make sense of her own life.  From here, maybe tomorrow or next week, she will move further, in whatever direction she needs to move.  This isn’t going to be “over” by the end of lunch when we go back to class.”

Point: Listening is not about making sad people happy.  Listening is more about helping a person who is feeling sad to feel that sadness, fully, and to be able to express and share it with another human being.   That process will move the speaker where he/she needs to move.  How can we be experts on other peoples’ lives?  How can we be sure, in a case like this, that distracting Grace from her distress is the best thing for her?  Maybe her deep feelings will be the source of a significant life change for her.  We can’t ever know that.

Ed

All listening really seems to be is an attitude of “you” vs. “me.”  Do I want to understand what the other person is communicating, or do I want to say something about it, react to it?

Most of us automatically  say something about it.  We immediately take a speaking turn, offering one or more of the standard 14 reactions: advice, questions, reassurance, agreement or disagreement, etc.  Why would I not want to interrupt from my own perspective?  It would only be because I might be more interested in hearing and understanding what the speaker is saying, than in making my own point about it.  I don’t interrupt when I am more interested in “you” than in “me.”  As I observe how conversations take place, most of us seem to be pretty self-absorbed.

Example: I choose to share this example because no profound results came for the speaker from my listening.  I just chose to listen to my lawyer friend because he wanted to share something with me.  It was a 10 minute phone conversation where he was describing a series of Court hearings involving a client he was representing in an alimony case.  Nothing “happened” as a result of my listening.  There was no “result.”  He didn’t achieve a breakthrough in his thinking, or “progress” from Point A to Point B.  He simply told me how excited he was about winning the case against big odds, and I let him do that by listening.  That was it.

Richie doesn’t usually sound this excited about his law practice (preferring to talk mostly about his magic shows), so I decided to start feeding back what I heard him talking about.  I fed back what I was hearing about 8 or 10 times in the 10 minutes:

• “So, with you not present at the first hearing, you believe something weird happened because the alimony award of $650/week was ludicrous given that your client was only making $2500/month in retirement income”
• “You figured his ex-wife must have lied, or her attorneys made something up, or that the judge just didn’t care”
• “You know his ex-wife’s law firm has a reputation for soaking their clients by having countless hearings and extensions, and you wanted to avoid that”
• “It was pretty amazing to you that you won all 3 motions from a different judge at that third hearing”
• “You walked out of that one with your head pretty high in front of those other attorneys.”

The interesting thing for me about this conversation was that my listening made absolutely no difference in how or what he shared.  It was as if I wasn’t even there. He kept speaking, and I kept listening.  After about 10 minutes he stopped and said, “Hey, Ed, let me tell you about the magic show I’m doing tomorrow.”

Point: I realized from this conversation that listening is simple.  Someone speaks and you listen.  Or you don’t.  You either stay in another person’s world for awhile to try to understand what life is like for him/her, or you don’t.  It’s not about profound insights happening for a speaker, or completions of serious issues, or clear movement from point A to point B. Those things often do occur, and when they do we are often present to a miracle.  And, those incredible results are more like side effects. Listening is just an attitude — do I listen when others talk to me? or do I speak (one of the 14 reactions) when others talk to me?

It’s that simple.

Ed