As part of wellbeing workshops I deliver, I usually spend time considering listening. I myself was guilty in the past of thinking, ‘what exactly does one need to learn about listening? I have two ears!’ However, as the years have gone by, I have realised it’s not a skill you can assume everyone (certainly not my past self!) has and we all know we have friends who listen better than others, even if we don’t always notice why this actually is.
If you do consciously consider the experiences you have when interacting with different people, it becomes apparent that they can be considerably varied – from extremely connecting and satisfying to actually quite agitating. How you feel as you walk away from a conversation seems to depend upon:
- How much of an actual interaction it was – were both parties responding to what was just said or was one or both just espousing their agenda?
- Whether anything was truly exchanged in terms of learning something you didn’t previously know or how interestingly the interaction developed ideas as you bounced off each other.
- How ‘heard’ you both actually felt.
- Whether the conversation flowed fairly or if joining in felt like trying to jump into a turning rope!
- How ‘present’ and attentive the person was for you and you were for them.
- In some cases, whether you both got to speak!
- How accepting you were of each other and what was shared.
- Etc.
How I see listening, is as one of the best gifts you can give to another. Not all interactions need to be deep, meaningful and/or entertaining of course but when you want to truly connect with someone, listening is a very good place to start – as nearly everyone has probably spent much of their life struggling to be truly heard and not being heard is the opposite of being validated.
Now obviously if two people set out to just listen, there would be no conversation, but in most cases with most people, I have found the balance in any conversation tends to be towards a need to speak more than to listen – so this is unlikely to happen! There are also times when it is obvious that the person you are with has a problem and really needs to be listened to and in those cases, listening is obviously the most helpful and kindest thing to do.
So what constitutes good listening and what doesn’t? The list above gives some quite clear clues but there are further pitfalls and skills.
One of the worst pitfalls is bombarding people with advice. It seems helpful and of course it comes from a place of love. However, quite often unsolicited advice is jarring as the person offering it does not have the comprehensive understanding of the problem that the person with it has. The advice is likely to miss the mark because of this – besides which – most people with a problem actually just have a need to express it (and sometimes in doing so, work out exactly what their problem is)! Also, with a bit of active listening and the person is more likely to solve their own problem than if you just push short-cuts. Another pitfall is over-identification with what someone is saying: they tell you something difficult has happened, and you steal the show with – not only has the same terrible thing happened to you – but it was even worse! There are more pitfalls of course – mostly born of a reluctance to value the importance of listening properly.
So active or good listening requires effort, focus and ‘making it all about the other person’. That is why it’s good to see it as a gift: one that can be especially pleasing to give. It takes practice to do it really well and for some, it’s a real shift in a life-long pattern of behaviour. Some people never get there of course.
Active listening requires your full presence/focus, absence of distraction, full acceptance of the other person, signs of encouragement to fully show your engagement (‘mmm’, ‘go on’), seeking clarification when needed, concentration and empathy. With practice, these things just get better and better.
(One tip on the empathy front is to feedback what someone is likely feeling as they speak to you. Being on the receiving end of feedback that correctly guesses what you’re feeling makes you feel super cared for, very tuned into and helps a you open up further. Try it on someone. It really works! Another tip for empathy is don’t imagine what YOU will feel in a situation, try hard to imagine what it is like for the person you are empathising with, to be THEM in THEIR situation. )
And all of this equally applies to children. It’s easy in the busy furore of life to forget to really tune into what children are saying – especially as it doesn’t always make sense in ‘adult’ terms. However, a little genuine focus without distraction and lots of empathy goes a long way in helping children feel like they do truly have a voice and they metaphorically end up feeling the need to shout less!
In one workshop, someone had a true penny drop moment when he declared, ‘all this time I thought it was about filling the space with my stuff……’
