Active Listening

What does active listening look like to you?

Here's an analogy of my thoughts.

When others actively listen to me, repeat in their own words what I’ve said, I feel anxious about how they’re going to respond. It’s as if I’m sitting in a classroom and the problem is my teacher.

• When someone repeats what I’ve said, it’s like they’ve been invited to pull up a desk next to me.

• Are they going to ask questions to the problem that I should’ve asked myself?

• Are they going to try and fix my problem?

• Will they attempt to “know” better than I should have?

• I don’t know and my first reaction is that it makes me feel anxious about what I’ve just opened up for them to entertain.

I think being an active listener is good but it’s not the same as having the intent to “walk in someone else’s shoes”.

There’s a story about Gandhi of when a young mother brought her son to him. He ate too much sugar and needed to stop for health reasons. Instead of telling the boy what to do, in the following weeks Gandhi weaned himself off of sugar.

To me that’s being an empathetic listener. And I think it starts with respecting and almost honoring that state of vulnerability others are in as an acknowledgement for how we all approach the common thread of uncertainty differently. It’s a discussion that’s motivated me to work on this team and I welcome your comments and feedback.

Thanks Aaron

Thanks for sharing your anxieties around active listening?

I feel this is a rich, fundamental and important topic to explore!

I see active listening or empathic listening as one of the most powerful and fundamental tools for deepening empathy.

I’m attaching my personal story of mediating a conflict in my family. This was done essentially with empathic listening and family empathy circles.

I’m also attaching a guide on how to take part in an empathy circle.

What if we try doing an empathic listening circle in the team, and then capture our experiences with it. We could also see how we might redesign empathic listening in the family to better address people’s needs.

Edwin

Hi Aarron,

Thank you for sharing. This is a very important issue that you raised.

It is interesting that you distinguished between active listening and empathic listening. Perhaps they are different things.

I think we have difficulties with empathic listening because it's fundamentally not natural to us, or at least, it has been "eliminated" through socialisation.

Our natural, immediate response is to judge, criticise and advise. This is the most common response in our conversations. And perhaps that is why it might have been scary for you (for everyone) because we are not used to it. Because we, each and everyone of us, know that when we listen, we judge, criticise and advise, and so we expect the same thing from others. I think empathic listening is difficult because it means letting go of all these "natural" responses, i.e. not judging, not criticising, not advising, not sharing any personal stories, not saying "you should", not telling the other person how to feel or think, not fixing their problems for them (men do that very often for their women, when their women just want to be heard). JUST LISTENING and UNDERSTANDING, and, as Aarron so beautifully said, HONOURING the state of vulnerability. That's it. Somehow it sounds so simple!

What I learned so far is that there are different stages of listening and you can progress from 1 till 4 as they get more difficult to do:

• 1. Mimic: repeat the words the other person has said back to them.

  2. Rephrase: put the other person's meaning into your own words.

  3. Reflect feeling: say out loud what the other person is feeling (instead of saying).

  4. Rephrase the content and reflect the feeling: (so you combine stage 2 and 3), e.g. when a teenage boy says: "I hate homework!" you might say to them back: "You're really frustrated about school"

This is taken from a superb book: "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey (http://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_7_Habits_of_Highly_Effective_People)

What I realised is that the last step is exactly what Edwin does. Listen to him next time, really. He usually says:

"So what I'm hearing is that you... (here he paraphrases what was said and adds how the other person might be feeling), right?"

(Sorry Edwin for putting you on the spot. You are an example in this and I wanted to make everyone aware of it and learn from you.)

Thanks Aarron for sharing your perspective with us. It was a prompt for me to share what I know with the group.

Best,

Sonja