Pohangina Pete's
neighbourhood cat Charlie, who's an excellent listener
I try to listen to
the still, small voice within
but I can’t hear it
above the din
[ -- Little
Audrey’s Story by Eliza Ward]
Listening is a skill, like talking or walking. We learn it by practice;
we lose that skill by not practicing it. Its mastery is necessary to
competent conversation, even to empathy: If we cannot really hear
others, how can we understand them, and if we cannot understand them,
how can we care about them?
Karl
Menninger said: "Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative
force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When
we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and
expand." Good listening skill thus has tremendous social power, perhaps more even than good speaking ability.
To listen, we need to silence both the external noise 'pollution' that
masks much of the richness of sound all around us, like a fog obscures
our vision of everything except the fog and the things in immediate
proximity, and the internal noise, the machine
in our heads, which prevents us not only from hearing and
listening, but from thinking (including processing what we hear) and
from being our authentic selves.
Yesterday's poem-essay on why we do what we do contained my story about
the increase of bird and squirrel chatter just after I filled the
feeders, and, when I continued to stay close to the feeders, the subsequent silence a
few short minutes later when they gave up waiting for me to leave. I
would not have been able to write this a year ago -- I had forgotten
how to listen, and would never have 'heard' the silence.
The sounds all around us constitute a series of ecosystems of their
own,
and as in physical ecosystems the human aural or acoustic ecology of
humans competes with our attention and drowns out all others. Listen to
conversations and watch the power struggle between people to dominate
the conversation, by consuming the bandwidth with volume (both
amplitude and frequency). Just as many of us can no longer see the
beauty in a natural landscape or seascape, many of us can no longer
hear any soundscapes
but our city's and that of our own voice.
In an article last week Pohangina Pete wrote:
When the world’s full of noise you don’t hear
what’s said softly, you miss the subtle sounds: racked by
dissonance, you can no longer listen...Sometimes you only hear what the
world’s saying when it’s silent...Eventually Tigger [Pete's cat]
stops purring and sits on the edge of the verandah with his back to me,
looking out at the brilliantly green paddock. Small movements of his
ears; locating things I can’t hear. I wonder what his silence
sounds like...Sometimes you only notice things when they’re
no longer there. When the wind dies, for example, and the soft rattle
of cabbage tree leaves ceases; when the bumble bee fumbling and buzzing
along the verandah finally settles on a blue clothes peg—then
you notice the silence.
Whisper to an animal, instead of talking (or shouting!) and
watch its surprised and attentive response. Listen attentively,
carefully, without interjecting or thinking about how to respond, in a
conversation with another human talking about something they care
about, and you will get that same astonished, rapt response. It even
works on the telephone -- people can hear you listening.
So what can we do, how can we become better listeners? Here are some ways to practice re-learning to listen:
- Close your
eyes. Like Muffin, shut off the other sensory inputs to
your brain and let sound emerge. Try it when you're 'watching' TV or a
movie. A famous producer once said that if audiences re-learned to
listen, to the nuances of voice, to the complex sounds of footsteps and
wind and kisses, TV and movies wouldn't need music anymore. This will
also provoke your imagination, much as the opposite (watching TV with
the sound off) does.
- Get away
from noise. Turn off the TV. And the stereo. And the PC,
even if the sound is off. Find a quiet place where there is no
competition for your aural attention.
- Learn to
meditate. While meditation involves learning to tune out
external distractions, including sounds, it is a way of learning to
focus attention on one thing. Once learned, that focus can then be on
listening.
- Listen
with your eyes. Pay attention to eye, hand, facial and
body language. The ears are the main organ for listening, but not the
only one.
- In
meetings, say less. Use a (real or imaginary) talking
stick. Plan to say nothing during the meeting, and just to
listen to what others say. Make the purpose of the meeting deciding
what you will personally do
as a result of what you learn in the meeting, not adding your two
cents' worth. Don't interrupt. Take the stick (or the floor) no more
than twice during the meeting, and then only to build on something that
someone else has said. Be amazed at how much more carefully people
listen to you when you speak more slowly, quietly and infrequently, and
how intelligent they say your comments are. Also, ask intelligent and
interesting questions. They force you to pay
attention to what others are saying, and help the person talking
appreciate your interest in the subject and focus their answer on you,
making your listening more rewarding and hence reinforcing the
listening skill.
- Practice
interviewing, and facilitating others' conversations.
Interviewing forces you to listen to the answers of the interviewee.
And by focusing on making others' conversations articulate, coherent
and productive, you will learn a lot about the skill of conversation,
and hence about the skill of listening.
- Record or
write down what you hear. "Play back" your recording or
paraphrasing, to see what you missed.
- Eavesdrop
on others' conversations. Learn from their listening
mistakes. But be careful -- you may end up laughing out loud at the
absurd misunderstandings that others' inability to listen causes, and
blow your cover.
- Find model
good listeners. Listen to them, and discover how they do
it. Ask them how they became exceptional listeners. Learn from their
example. And just trying to identify great listeners will force you to
listen more carefully.
- Teach your
children how to listen. Read to them, and pay attention to
what they say. Be a model for them, teaching them by listening
carefully to them, paraphrasing, clarifying, helping them learn and
understand. From teaching, we learn ourselves.
With regard to point 10, way back in 1939 Margaret Wise Brown wrote a children's book called The Noisy Book. Here's the story:
Muffin, a very little dog, one day gets a cinder in his eye. The
veterinarian puts a bandage around Muffin’s eyes
and he can no longer see. His ears now become his guide to the world
around him. It is an acoustic world of often confusing sounds. When
Muffin finally arrives home he hears a sound he cannot identify. It is
both familiar and yet strange. He cannot determine what it is. Readers
are asked to guess what Muffin might be hearing and the answer is
finally revealed at the end of the story.
If we want to teach our children to listen, and learn to do so ourselves, this would seem a worthy addition to the bookshelf.
I was tempted to add to the above list: Avoid discussions and meetings on things you
don't care about, and conversations with people who are terrible
listeners, since they make listening tedious and unpleasant, and
negatively reinforce your listening habits. But that's most meetings and
conversations. Easier said than done, alas.
"The biggest problem with communication", said Shaw, "is the
illusion that it has occurred." Much of that illusion is created by
inarticulate and inconsiderate speakers.
The rest is the fault of our
lost listening skills. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
