Listening Anew
Listening well is a civil act. It is crucial to the success of mediation, negotiation, conflict resolution, and reconciliation processes that occur on the road to peacemaking. Most self-improvement, advice, and how-to books point out the need to listen carefully. Two basic concepts can enhance your listening skills: recognizing the significance of story; and making use of the space between you as listener and the speaker.
What you hear as you listen is a fragment of the speaker’s life, in that they have come to their thinking from life experiences and education, so they are, in a sense, attached to what they say. It is as if their words are a part of them. They are telling you (a fragment of) their story. The space between the two of you is precious and alive. The just-between-the-two-of-us phrase, used after sharing a confidence, makes this relationship clear.
The space between the two of you is alive with the message. When the speaker’s words resonate, you are using the space between you actively, pulling the other’s thoughts into your being. Yes, I hear you. Not necessarily that I believe what you the speaker has said, but that I have listened, and will treat your thought with respect, with compassion, with accountability, and so on, as appropriate for the utterance.
What you hear as you listen is a fragment of the speaker’s life, in that they have come to their thinking from life experiences and education, so they are, in a sense, attached to what they say. It is as if their words are a part of them. They are telling you (a fragment of) their story. The space between the two of you is precious and alive. The just-between-the-two-of-us phrase, used after sharing a confidence, makes this relationship clear.
The space between the two of you is alive with the message. When the speaker’s words resonate, you are using the space between you actively, pulling the other’s thoughts into your being. Yes, I hear you. Not necessarily that I believe what you the speaker has said, but that I have listened, and will treat your thought with respect, with compassion, with accountability, and so on, as appropriate for the utterance.
How gratifying to have the space between you come alive with listening, your words resonating in shared space,
your story absorbed and reflected in understanding.
Active Listening
When listening actively, we listen with serious intent, looking at the speaker, gathering in and genuinely acknowledging what the speaker is saying, responding in a way that signals understanding.
Say-Back
I ask the listener to say back to me what I have just said. This action involves the listener’s complex cognitive response of understanding, formulating that understanding into words, and stating them in such a way that I know the listener understands. Say-back has the practical quality of affirming understanding, and also slowing the pace in an intense discussion so that all parties can gather their thoughts.
Accountability Listening
Here we listen actively, with an intent to reason and respond in an accountable way, and with the possibility of changing one’s own thinking, words, and responses as a result (see Ratcliffe, bibliography). There is little chance for civility without the commitment to listen well, consider the meaning of the words spoken, give them due regard, offer understanding if not agreement, and carry that understanding into future reasoning and perhaps action. Accountability is pivotal to the art of persuasion.
Standing-Under Listening
Standing-under listening is a kind of accountability listening (see Ratcliffe, bibliography). Using the space around us in new ways, we invert the term understanding and stand-under words, letting them and their meaning wash over us, absorbing them, and allowing them to be with us, while realizing they convey story — past experience, angst, and emotion, of an Other, whose experience may be radically different from our own.
Compassionate Listening
Compassionate Listening draws on all four of the above approaches and is especially useful when deep differences and dissension pervade the situation, and when getting to understanding is important for the listener, and, of course, rewarding to the speaker. The eight-step exchange involves telling, reflecting, responding, perhaps questioning, and continuing the sequence until the speaker feels well-heard (see Arbor, bibliography).
These processes delve deeply into how to listen well, and with civility. It bears mentioning that we listen well when we listen with a consciousness of our own stories, failures, and challenges. Indeed, listening may give voice to those who have been denied it.
You give a gift when you listen so that someone can be well heard.