Listening Is An Attitude of “You”

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