Bernie's Blog Week 12: Fordham Futures: Listening

     From the Latin, ob audine to listen means to reach out. Therefore, to listen is a response to some outer stimulation to your senses which integrates this new information within the parameters of your inner world. You need to listen in order to be aware of your experience. Listening is very rarely taught in your classes, you sometimes take it for granted as an ability that develops in a unique personal fashion. There is nothing natural about listening, it is an ability that needs to be nurtured and exercised. How you listen to the world around you is as original as your fingerprints.
      During the first ten years of your life you were engaged in a continuous dance between your inner world and the outer world that surrounds your experience. Your senses connect you everything you encounter. As adults, you later learn the skills of centering and focusing, however, as a child you extend and reach out into the world around you with a rhythmic process of experimentation. Consequently, you need to develop the art of being able to observe your abilities to respond to tone, rhythm, movement, music, and language.
      As you enhance your listening abilities you expand the boundaries of your abilities to expand your learning potential. Attentive, effective, and profound listening skills will truly empower your lifelong learning abilities. Your journey from listening to lifelong learning begins with the attainment and development of attentive listening skills and the creation of inner speech and inner listening. Every aspect of your life offers you with the opportunity to listen and learn in an endless journey of discovery and celebration.
      As you listen you are responding, and the first voice you hear is your own inner speech. Inner speech is an internal process through which you hear yourself think and listen, which enables you to use language to regulate your behavior, your reasoning, and your high level cognitive thought process. As your inner voice emerges, it gains strength and clarity building a bridge between your inner and outer worlds. Action, reflection, and reasoning become lifelong experiences of living and learning.
      You need to develop a continuous intention toward your attention. You need to have confidence in your concentration and concentration in your confidence. You need to empower your attentive listening, or risk the possibility that knowledge will become only logical facts.
      Albert Einstein believed, "Knowledge is experience; everything else is just information." Einstein was not a good student in school. At age fifteen, he left school with poor grades in history, english, and geography. For Einstein, the most important classroom was the world in which he lived. There he explored, listened, and experienced his discovery of new connections and paradigms. Einstein lived by three simple rules of work: "Out of clutter, find simplicity." "From discord, find harmony." And, "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."
      You listen more attentively when you feel that topical information creates meaning. Attentive listening naturally effects changes within your mind-body relationship. You listen with more attention when you feel that a change will be effected and that you are in some way responsible for the change.
      The intention and focus you hold in learning determines whether you are listening or merely hearing. When you listen only with the intention of being able to replay information for a test you may only hear and register the words. When you listen with the intention of effecting curiosity and discovery, or utilizing information in a creative process, you listen with insight, empowerment, and engagement. The more senses you use the deeper the listening the greater the learning.
      Inner listening plays a critical role in your creative understanding of preparation, illumination, and actualization of your experience. Your experience of inner listening regularly provides you with a sense of joy and accomplishment. Your personal discoveries inspire a contagious appreciation of learning that leads to more learning.
Attentive inner listening can be practiced in any aspect of learning and living: math problems, poetry, painting, music, historical events, and athletic experiences. All these activities can be engaged and listened to with your senses, your mind, your body, and your emotions.
      Attentive listening plays a critical role in preparing for and participating in information gathering, networking, and employment interviews. Listening to yourself and others enables, empowers, and informs your ability to fill the space that exists between performance and the description of performance. Prior to your interview, you need to specifically prepare yourself to be able to describe how your skills and abilities potentially fill the needs of a particular employer. Your assignment as an interviewee is to develop an active interview dialogue that builds an equality of communication between both interviewer and interviewee.
      In order to effectively prepare for your interview experiences you need to listen, first to your self, then to others, and finally to the world in which you live and work. However, before you can learn to listen you need to know what gets in the way of your listening. In order to understand what gets in the way of your listening, you need to pay attention to your senses. Your senses are constantly taking in information, twenty-four seven, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. As you manage this constant flow of information, and in an effort to keep yourself sane, you delete, distort, and generalize this information in order to make sense of your world.
      Failure to effectively manage this mountain of sensory effects you life on many cognitive, emotional, psychological, spiritual, and physical levels. For the past three decades, I have been utilizing and adapting the work of Matthew McKay, Martha Davis, and Patrick Fanning in teaching Fordham students about 'Blocks to Listening' as described in their text: Messages: The Communications Book.

Blocks to Listening:

1. Comparing - makes it hard to listen because you're always trying to assess who is smarter, more competent, more emotionally healthy - you or the other. While someone is talking, you think to yourself: 'Could I do it that well? You can't let much in because you're too busy seeing if you measure up.
2. Mind Reading - the mind reader doesn't pay much attention to what people say. Your trying to figure out what the other person is really thinking and feeling. The mind reader pays less attention to words than to intonations and subtle cues in an effort to see the truth. If you are a mind reader you probably make assumptions about how people react to you. These notions are born of intuition, hunches, and vague misgivings, and have little to do with what the person actually says to you.
3. Rehearsing - you don't have time to listen when your rehearsing what to say. Your whole attention is on the preparation and crafting of your next comment. You may look interested, and your mind is going a mile a minute because you have a story to tell, or a point to make.
4. Filtering - when you filter, you listen to some things and not others. You filter your listening to see if somebody's angry, or unhappy, or if you are in danger. Once assured that the communication contains none of those things, you let your mind wander. Another way people filter is simply to avoid hearing certain things - particularly anything threatening, negative, critical, or unpleasant. It's as if the words were never said, you simply have no memory of them.
5. Judging - if you prejudge someone, you don't pay much attention to what they are saying. You've already written them off, as negative labels have enormous power. A basic rule of listening is that judgments should only be made after you have heard and evaluated the content of the message.
6. Dreaming - you find yourself only half-listening, and something the person says suddenly triggers a chain of private associations. You are more prone to dreaming when you feel bored or anxious. Everybody dreams, and sometimes it takes great focus to stay tuned in. And if you dream a lot with certain people, it may indicate a lack of commitment to knowing and appreciating them. At the very least, it's a message that you don't value what they have to say very much.
7. Identifying - is all about you taking everything a person tells you and you refer and relate it back to your experience. Everything you hear reminds you of something that you've experienced before. Consequently, you launch into your story before they finish theirs. In this block, you are so busy with the stories of your life that there's no time to really hear or get to connect with the other person.
8. Advising - you view yourself as a great problem-solver always ready to help with insight and suggestions. Consequently, you believe that you don't have to hear more than a few sentences before you begin to search for the correct advice. However, while you are thinking about possible responses you may miss what's most important. You can miss the feelings and emotions associated with the stated problem or situation, thereby, ignoring the speaker because you wouldn't listen and just be there for the other.
9. Sparring - this block is all about arguing and debating with other people. The other person never feels heard because you are so quick to disagree. Actually, a lot of your focus is on finding things to disagree with. You take strong stands and are very clear about your beliefs and preferences. The way to avoid sparring is to repeat back and acknowledge what you've heard. Look for one thing you might agree with.
10. Being Right - means you will go to any lengths [twist the facts, start shouting, making excuses or accusations] to avoid being wrong. You can't listen to criticism, you can't be corrected, and you refuse to take suggestions to change. Your convictions are unshakable. And since you won't acknowledge that your mistakes are mistakes, you continue to make them.
11. Derailing - this listening block is realized by suddenly changing the subject. You derail the train of conversation when you get bored or uncomfortable with a topic. Humor is another way of derailing by joking it off. This means that you continually respond to whatever is said with a joke in order to avoid what you perceive as anxiety by seriously listening to the other person.
12. Placating - "Right...Right...Absolutely ... I know...Of course you are...Incredible...Yes...Really?" You want to be nice, pleasant, and supportive. You want people to like you. So you agree with everything. You may half-listen, just enough to get the drift, and you're not really involved. You are placating rather than paying attention and examining what's being said.