If you’ve experienced one of my team sessions, you may well have heard one of my JK’isms ( those phrases I use on repeat)
Listen to receive, not just respond.
We are often so ready to contribute our own thoughts and opinions. Or eager to impart knowledge and perspectives that we end up disrupting or limiting our ability to transmit and understand each other more deeply.
Add to that, that so many more people in the room may openly share neurodiversity - and how this impacts their communication- and we find ourselves with even more need to listen deeply.
In this week's blog, I am reflecting on this crucial skill and awareness within communication.
Whether reading from the lens of personal, professional or world-view understanding. I invite you to curiously consider ‘Are you truly listening’ as you land with the words of this blog.
Listening is a complex skill set. Whether in conversation with others. Or - as is so often over looked in our own well-being- listening towards and within ourselves.
The areas I explore today are by no means exhaustive. They are layers of that complex communication onion. Peeled back to reveal an opportunity to reflect.
Listening with our ears - Can you hear me? How often have we said this, since our lives zoomed to virtual? ‘You’re on mute’.
Yet in these requests we are inviting connection, and listening.
At the very beginning of listening with our ears, there is ensuring we actually have clarity in our environment to listen. This might seem obvious but its often overlooked.
A few years ago I attended a networking group, our focus was to meet, connect and converse. Yet we’d met in a bar with loud music, the space was cramped and people shuffled, got interrupted and most of our words to each other fell away to the beat of the music or awkwardness to ask one more time Could you say that again please’.
An environment that facilitates open listening is crucial to connect.
Conversation is a music script. There are layers to what we say (and don’t ) there are tones, words, intentions, emphasis and phrasing to hear and receive. In equal measure, there is an awareness that- due to our unique un-replicated positions in the world- we will equally hear things differently.
Listening to the words - Words are powerful things, and when we listen to receive them
They also add complexity. Sometimes too big, or unclear. A double-entendre or cultural niche. So much filler to pick apart to get to the core. That single word that lands like a Mic drop and clears the rest of the conversation.
'Use your words wisely' a teacher once said to me. But what she was really saying was to notice the response you get from others in the words that you use. Is what we are hearing, what we are meaning and how can we hold ourselves accountable to speak and hear clearly? Inside and out!
Listening for pictures - Conversation is art. Yes, we are all artists, and much of our language paints pictures, metaphors and imagery that highlight our deeper emotional landscape. As someone who uses a number of metaphor modalities in my therapeutic coaching approaches and in facilitating group dynamics. These lyrical pictures help me to understand the situation in a new way. I find myself inquisitive, seeking more information on the metaphor they used or the picture they painted with words. Listen for the pictures and help to paint clarity.
Listening with our eyes - Alongside what we are hearing is also what we are seeing. Our animal communication remains innate within us. Still scanning for body language and movement, assessing the environment around us. Assessing risk potential, formulating understanding.
Sometimes its distracts our hearing, but if we lean into the visual conscious for a moment or too, we can deepen our listening.
In conversation, I love to take my focus for a few moments and really seek to notice the person.
I'll notice any assumptions or biases that squeak in my mind as I do and consciously put them to one side. I find this deepens my rapport and understanding, I connect with their eyes (in a non-creepy way hopefully) and notice small micro-gestures. It has taken practice to encourage this awareness in myself but I've found I become a much better listener for it. It stopped being a distractive practice and now deepens my connection instead.
Listening within our body - How often do you truly connect in and with your body?
Land somatically in your flesh, limbs, bones, biological being?
How much do you flip your dialogue internally - in a helpful non-deprecating way- and explore what's 'going on' for you, right no?. I thoroughly encourage this practice in all my sessions. Because we are so outside of ourselves, disassociated, busy and making it even harder to hear ourselves and others.
The really simple way to listen to our body is to go physical. Notice tensions, create movement and stretches that ease ourselves into openness. That makes space to receive
Beyond that, there is a reminder that breath is super important to helping us regulate communication. It can calm us down in stressful or exciting chats, or helps us tune in to ourselves and pervade the noise of ‘stuff’
So rarely do we listen and name our emotions. I always cite Dr Marc Brackett's fabulous book ‘Permission to feel’ which I’ve shared numerous times as a source for better communication.
Taking time in or outside of conversation with others. Leading this as part of the conversation with others too. Inviting us to pause together and ‘check in’ ‘How are our energy levels right now?’ repeating the question if the response of ‘fine’ falls before you’ve even put a full stop for yourself. ‘What's the feeling we are trying to explore here’ and ‘What about the other ones we are keeping to ourselves?’
A rich tapestry of layers. Important to truly listen.
Listening with our heart, gut and head - When I begin working with clients, it's most common that their head is ‘running the show’ - they say it in their language sometimes - ‘it's doing my head in’ or ‘I’m way up here all the time’ cue a gesture with hand to forehead. Yet despite all its logic, intricacy and methodology, too much head gets us stuck sometimes.
Keeping ourselves balanced and congruent. Both internally and in our relational conversations; is a valuable resource for deeper understanding. In coaching, this is a place where we explore more deeply how to listen with and to the heart. Where to seek gut instinct or courage, of a feeling of danger or fear. When we listen leading with just one part, we can lose the bigger picture and response. By seeking to sense our inner committee, or hearing these views from others - a full sense of meaning can be explored and motivating ignited, beyond the listening - in the doing too.
With awareness of our own stories & beliefs - What a web of beliefs and life experiences we have when we show up in conversation with others.
I often imagine that each person has a set of rocks or luggage about their person, representing these many stories, beliefs and unconscious biases that are filtering our words and meaning together. Being aware of our stories, how they form our own communication styles and how they compartmentalise the meaning of others can help us to be deeper and wiser in conversations.
This often helps us identify ‘why’ we respond or communicate in situations and how we might navigate conversations too. Sometimes, life stories and beliefs land in our favour. and support deep listening. Other times they hinder, complicate or form barriers to deeper connection and understanding.
Listening for values - One of my most well-received coaching activities is a values-scape. An opportunity for people to truly understand what matters, what is important to them (and if doing as a team) to others too. To see their inner compass and know our own.
Listening for, and being aware of, how our own values contribute to navigating dialogue gives so much insight. I wish that we had a chance, when going into any conversation, to first receive a list of each other's values to review. Whilst I know this is not practically possible. I do wonder how many conflicts might be better explored and resolved if this was our starting post of understanding and receiving.
Listening into silence - I don’t have enough fingers or toes to tally up the amount of times someone has shared that they ‘hate silence’.
I could go into a rant about how this is a mirror of our over-subscribed society, the need for noise and distraction, but I’ll keep us focused.
I've always found silence fascinatingly beautiful!
Silence and pause are powerful constructs of complex communication dynamics. In the animal kingdom silence is a crucial mechanism for survival. Allowing processing and response time. Many animals have evolved to be able to understand the layers of silence that prevail in a habitat. How the pressure changes, when footsteps cease and prey might be afoot, in the undergrowth, when the acorn ceases to land and it's time to burrow down and sleep.
Silence offers us something delicious. It offers processing time, adjustment, regulation, recognition, and a chance to consider what we might say next or where we need to clarify.
Silence isn’t nothingness. It's a space that happens between us.
In deep listening and conversation. We stop being our separate selves and fill the space between us with something new, unique and often complex in that moment.
Whilst we each hold our own messages internally and may be racing through them as the world outside us sits quietly. I see these silent spaces between us as an important entanglement to gaze into, explore and unravel. A word that dropped to the floor, a curious enquiry of ‘what's happening here’ sweeping the space between ourselves to wade around in.
Silences have edges too. Often interesting ones, meeting each other. Rubbing against. Causing tensions. See if you can listen to these when you practice deep listening. Then do this....
Listening to understand and clarify
By now you can really see the complex layers that form our amazing conversations with each other. and how amazing it is, that we are hearing anything at all with all this going on.
So we need to be sure that what sense-making we are aiming for, makes sense.
For me clarifying is very important. Because we are hearing things differently to intentions all the time. Sometimes we also need to ‘try our words on for size’ put them into the space and then reform them in mutual re-understanding.
The Talking Revolution (How Creative Conversation Can Change the World) by Peter Osborn and Eddy Canfor-Dunas emphasises the importance of ‘understanding…focusing on achieving clarity’, ‘Challenging’ and ‘Being understood’ recognising that listening to each other is an investment we all are making to leave with clarity and consciousness. And that requires yet more layers of conscious listening and requesting to really hear what means to be said.
Unsaids and Shadows
I haven’t yet spoken about the elephant in the room. The unsaid and the shadows we carry in conversations. The parts we don’t let others see, or perhaps even know for ourselves.
All conversations have edges, annexes, unknowns and unsaid's. They have time limits, energy limits, skills and knowledge barriers.
We might be aware that there is something we don’t know or see and we may also be accidentally adding things that were not there, and make no space to name them.
If you return back to a sense of consciously receiving, listening and ‘digesting’ before you respond. You can minimise the potential for these unsaid, unknowns and shadows to dominate the space in your listening mine.
But it still remains. Communication is complex for sure.
One of the biggest shadows I am delving into for myself this year is around ‘whiteness’ and better understanding how this shows up in the way I and others communicate and listen. In the messages that are heard and dominated. How my very being, may be an oppressive factor in group think.
Its uncomfortable of course. But its showing up as important. So I'm listening.
By bringing understanding of it within myself first - with the help of peers, supervision, reflective practice and research. I am hoping to untie knots and listen with 'new ears' in a future-focused way.
Closing down the unnecessary noise
We can’t speak and listen to all the layers at once. But we can help each other by creating healthy boundaries and clear edges in conversation. By knowing what is a distracting tangent, an avoidance of the space between. By trying to set the whole world right and ignoring our capacity for control and influence. We actually limit deep listening.
Define the parameters of your listening space. Is it expansive, does it have focus or context?
Are there important roles in the listening dynamic that need defining before you deep dive in?
Listening deeply is also about contracting together what is for now. And what needs its own space, or letting go, or someone else to talk it through with?
So often for me, there is another space to be held beyond the listening together.
After the conversation, carried within us.
It may not be for then. But sometimes this aftermath is for personal enquiry and pause.
So it doesn't become noise we carry around in our mind, ignoring the wisdom of hearing it. Unpacking it for ourselves could reap.
Remember it's not just listening to others.
Deep listening always has a place for yourself too.
Listening to Nature, Listening to Earth
It might seem strange for me to bring Nature in. But I'm here to share my point of view and experience of ways listening has enriched my relationships and life. In hope this helps you in some way too.
In ancient cultures across the world. Nature was the first place humans laid their ears and hearts.
To understand and be guided, to make space within themselves (something scientists might now refer to as Attention Restoration Theory reduces stress and anxiety). They listened to the symbolism of the forests, fields and oceans and saw them as the wisest part of their community.
They held circles deep within their wild spaces and looked in on their collective in between.
Danced to the edges and woven listening through generations.
The sought spirit quests and soul initiations in which to make it safe for us to be alone, within ourselves.
Then we lost that.
We gave it up - as wider societal practice, and whilst I celebrate its emergence in our Western world. It's still 'out there' and often met with cynicism.
Yet when I began to take myself back to the woods. I saw that I had a greater capacity to listen. There was energy, space, insight, inspiration.
Animals came to me to listen also.
Can you believe that? It's true!
As people joined me, we also shifted to different forms of communication.
The silence seemed totally natural.
Accepting there was more to be listened to than the sound of our own voices.
Listening to Nature helps us also to hear ourselves connect in new, wider and wilder ways.
We begin to receive a message of earth's and turmoil and courage.
Often showing up as mirrors within ourselves and our human-to-human dynamics.
So if you are looking to be a better communicator. A deeper listener.
Go first by yourself into Nature - to learn for yourself what this means.
The river and the rapids
I’ll end this blog with a metaphor. One that often comes to me, as I stand with a client and team at a stream edge.
Conversation is like a river. Look at a river or stream and you’ll see the many ways it flows, changes direction, and allows currents to entwine. Navigates rocks or natural dams, changes course with ease having understood a call for a new direction.
Yet when the flow is too great, too forced, when too much goes into one space, there is erosion, floods, and destruction.
As you listen to yourself and others. Consider what helps you slow or pause the rapids.
In what ways do you help each other's currents to connect and flow?
And when indeed, you’re reaching capacity.
Listen to that.
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