The Friend

Possibly the single most important skill any of us can have as human beings is the faculty of listening. Listening also ranks high as one of the greatest gifts we give to others and is a skill essential to our success in most any endeavor dealing with people. This makes perfect sense given that listening is our primary means of receiving input about others.

One aspect of listening important to the integral facilitator is the archetype we call “The Friend.”  The listening competencies associated with this role involve simply honoring the other person as a fellow human being who deserves to be heard.

The Friend Competencies

• Attend to whoever is speaking and if distracted reengage with the speaker.
• Listen to grasp significance and meaning of individual participant comments (content) while facilitating.
• Listen for depth and meaning in conversation using non-verbal cues in body language and my intuition.

Statistics on Listening

• How much of what we know that we have learned by listening? 85% (Shorpe)
• Amount of the time we are distracted, preoccupied or forgetful? 75% (Hunsaker)
• How much we usually recall immediately after we listen to someone talk? 50% (Robinson)
• Amount of time we spend listening? 45% (Robinson)
• How much we remember of what we hear? 20% (Shorpe)
• Those of us who have had formal educational experience with listening? Less than 2% (Gregg)

Source: www.listen.org

Listening Levels: Self, Significance, and Depth

Listen to Self.  To help you listen, notice when you are evaluating or judging what you or others are doing. These are voices of the past or future that sap our attention and disconnect us from the speaker and ourselves. When you notice that you are being carried away in thought, as opposed to listening, you have the choice to return to the present. This practice of noticing and choosing is always available and always useful.

Listen to Grasp Significance and Meaning. Hearing the essence of what someone is trying to communicate, particularly if they are unclear, is an art. It takes presence, intuition, and empathy to do this effectively. A simple model to practice is to listen, feel, and respond. Listen reflectively, “sense” meaning conveyed by the words, gestures, and effect of the speaker, then check what you’re hearing with the speaker for accuracy. This approach often helps the speaker more deeply clarify and express what’s going on for them.

Listen for Depth in Body Language, Intuition, and Omission. It’s been said that the majority of what’s communicated is not said in words. While paying attention to the words can be useful, don’t limit your attention to words alone. Also notice body language, energy levels, emotional affect, intuitive clues or gut instincts, and things that you would expect to be said that aren’t. If you notice something, inquire about it with the other as a way to possibly deepen the conversation.

Dialogical Listening

So much of our training and modeling in listening involved a debating style of conversation. Debate can be helpful at illuminating strengths, weaknesses, and various arguments around complicated issues. By complicated issues, we mean those where cause and effect relationships can be effectively understood given sufficient analysis and expertise.

Many of today’s issues are beyond complicated. They tend to be increasingly complex, meaning that cause and effect relationships are unclear, only known retrospective of actions taken. The debate style of conversation, where listening to win is the order of the day, will yield consistently ineffective approaches to dealing with complex issues.

To navigate today’s complex issues (multi-disciplinary, multi-sector, global, etc.) we must learn to listen to understand. This is the kind of listening that occurs in dialogue that will support a shift from silos to collaboration in our organizations.

Dialogue is…

• Listening to Understand
• An open and alive journey of exploration.
• About NOT KNOWING!
• Not about Making Decisions
• Divergent vs. Convergent

Listening Levels impact the quality of our conversations as illustrated in the figure below. Note that deeper levels of listening and conversation also tend to correlate to stages of group development. The stage of a group informs the type of listening employed and vice versa. If you seek to deepen the level of conversation in a group, employ, teach, or facilitate a deeper level of listening.

Four Practices of Dialogue         

In his book, Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together , William Isaacs presents the following four practices to support the process of dialogue:

• Listen Fully: Recognize and put to aside the “resistances and reactions that we feel to what someone else is saying.” Notice your reaction and then continue to listen.
• Respect: The principle of coherence underlies the practice of respect. Coherence, also meaning wholeness, invites us to look for elements of commonality as the dialogue unfolds. Or said another way, listen as if it were all in me. For if we can perceive something in another, assume then that it’s also a part of our own mental world. This is particularly helpful when irritated by someone’s contribution. Here we can examine our own thoughts, feelings and behavior, to find where we might have the same thing in us. From this perspective it is easier to fully acknowledge the other; not to agree, but to include whatever it is in the whole.
• Suspending: Isaacs locates the meaning of the word suspend in its root, which means stretch or spin, and says that to suspend thought is “to spin it out so that it can be seen, like a web between two beams in a barn”. Isaacs proposes two levels of suspension:

  1) Openly state the “contents of your consciousness”, thoughts, feelings, opinions, so that all can see what is going on.

  2) Move upstream to be aware that thoughts and feelings arise in oneself in the very personal context of history and memory—hence they are our own productions, not objective facts about the external world. This awareness makes a crucial difference to the way we communicate them to others.

• Voicing: Overcome self-censorship. One way of doing this is to consider what might be the risk if you don’t speak, as well as the risk if you do. Consider what it is that you really want to create.