Active Listening

 

Because of all of this, we are incredibly vulnerable. We don’t have a clue that the world is not what we think it is. We don‘t grasp that every experience and every perspective we have is but a tiny drop in the bucket of life. We don’t have the wisdom to understand that human beings are incapable of grasping truth. Truth requires seeing life from all perspectives at once, and we only get one tiny perspective apiece, that based on our tiny personal experience. We try to engage life from what we believe is truth in order to get our needs met, but so often our efforts fail or only partially succeed. We are constantly confronted with a world filled with different perspectives and truths. It is really quite terrifying. How are we going to survive when surrounded by so much difference?

This frequent feeling of vulnerability pushes us to try to imagine what we need in order to feel strong and solid in the world. From a very young age, we form the desire to be the most important, to be able to do whatever we want, to always be right, and to always be supported in these desires. In imagination, these conditions would solve all our insecurities and make us feel okay. But real life does not seem to want to give us what we believe we need to be okay. It does not make us most important all the time. Life does not let us do whatever we want anytime we want. It does not even understand that we are always right all the time! This constant barrage of negative input on our golden solution to our bad feelings causes us to suppress our answer to all our fears and insecurities back to the back of our brain and down into our subconscious. It never actually goes away. That subconsciousness is where our feeling motivators live, those longings we have a hard time putting a clear name to.

Somewhere along the line, usually when hormones hit in the early teen years, that deep longing generates a belief that if we could only find others that truly see things the same way as we do, that they will support and encourage our long-suppressed solution to our insecurities. Finding that sameness becomes the new driver in our life. We look for peers and intimates that reflect our personal feeling truths. Our essential existence seems to be dependent on this. We will reject home and family in exchange for this chance of sameness. The line I have heard many times is “If they only truly understood me, then they would see things my way.” Unfortunately, this profound, heartfelt truth is concealing a big lie.

You can find sameness in the world. You can associate with friends and folks that see the world like you do, and enjoy the comfort and support of a like-minded group of others. This can feel truly wonderful and empower you to feel more confident and expressive within that group. This is good in my eyes. But that inner feeling of insecurity that plagued you when you were little is still there, buried deep inside. The golden solution that you believed would manifest if you could just find others that understood how you felt still is not happening. You wanted to be most important – well, sameness blocks that. If you are all the same, then no one is more than the other. We want to be able to do whatever we want whenever we want, and any time we belong to a group that gets shot down immediately. Belonging requires respect for others, not self-indulgent pursuit of personal desires. By the same token, always being right is not an option because that means you are making everyone else wrong, and that does not fly in a group environment. Everything that makes you special and unique gets swept away in order to belong to a group.

What you can get is support. To the extent that your needs and wants align with the agreed-upon values of your group of sameness, they will support you. Life has been training you in the essential skill of harmony. Life does this because harmony preserves the continuation of the species. Wanting support teaches you how to both ask for support and give support in response. But even within group settings, you see a couple of leaders getting most of the support and lots of other folks doing most of the supporting without getting much back. I believe that those that manage to secure the support of their peers have an internal belief structure that says they are valuable. Those that don’t, believe that they don’t have value. There are books’ worth of information on the dynamics of group interactions.

What I want to discuss here is a powerful skill that anyone can develop to make themselves highly valuable to others that requires no specialized knowledge or physical abilities. It may be the most valuable skill in any social situation, particularly since it is so underutilized. That skill is called active listening. It is very simple yet difficult at the same time. It requires you to be able to focus, and it requires you to be able to hush your ego. It is very similar to what you have to do to meditate effectively.

The mysterious trick to active listening is understanding that listening to what someone is saying is the smallest part of the process. Only 20 to 25% of communication is in the words a person says. 50% is in the speaker’s expressions and body language, and the other 25% is in the vocal intonations. Active listening is about taking in the full 100% of what a person is expressing, plus even more. Begin with the largest percentage – facial expression and body language. The majority of that is found in the eyes, so riveted eye contact is a must. You soak in the moment-to-moment tiny changes in the micro-expressions around their eyes as they tell their story. This tells you about how they feel as they tell their story. Larger awareness includes their mouth – smiles, frowns, and so on. Full body posture tells you about their general stance to their subject matter. Take all this in. For a few brief moments, you are making them the most important person on the planet.

At the same time, listen to the quality of their voice. Is it relaxed, tense, excited, sad? Listen to the pacing of their narrative – hurried, slow-paced, demanding? Voice tone is used to conduct the feeling response of the audience. This is the stuff that actors have to train in a lot to make their role-playing convincing. Selling the emotional narrative is the real communication a person is giving out. The story is just the opportunity today the speaker uses to get attention on how they feel inside. That inside feeling is what people want heard and recognized. That recognition is what has value.

Generally, people don’t know that this is what they are really looking for, so they believe their story is important. For this reason, we have to also listen to the actual story. Let’s step into the active part of active listening. As you listen to a person, you will notice little pauses in the telling where they are creating an opening for a response. What they are looking for is a smile, a grunt, a nod, a small something that says you are tracking what they are saying and on the same page. It is like when the preacher pauses his sermon just long enough for the congregation to all say amen. They are not looking for you to jump in with your story or opinion on their story. Yes, that is when people do exactly that, and it completely tells the speaker that he was not being listened to. So often when others talk, our mind barely registers what they are saying because we are busy trying to think of what to say to get the attention diverted to us. Active listening requires you to shut your ego’s need for attention up and just listen. If you are thinking at all, you are not listening.

Okay, so how can you generate tremendous value for yourself with others without having to do anything? Active listening! Eye contact, watch for facial expressions, body language, emotional content in the voice tones, pacing, and small feedback that demonstrate that you are tracking them. Folks will love you for this, and you will become their best friend. It will also teach them how to give this same gift to you. This is deep-level mutual support. My experience is that this experience is sufficient to quiet the inner anxiety and relax the spirit. It is a different golden answer, maybe even a better one.

Take care,

David

 

Ellen

After talking to my two sons Father’s day morning, my youngest, Mason, sent me a gift certificate to Ruth’s Chris. I immediately got online and was able to get reservation for that day at 3pm. So we got to go out to dinner on Father’s day.

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