Actively NOT Listening

Have you noticed how much we read about listening?

It worries me a little.

The first part that worries me is how much listening is “taught” to be a series of behaviors: clear your space; nodding, making small sounds of recognition; that mimicking body postures makes the other feel seen; where you are to look and not to look; counting to three…

Can you even listen when your mind is so full of to-do lists of how you must behave to signal that you are listening?

Worrying me more is the shaming implicitly happening.  If you are not listening well, you should be ashamed – and doesn’t that also mean that we should be ashamed if we are talking?  Are we taking up space that is not rightfully ours?  Should I feel ashamed for writing this post and taking up yours, the reader’s, time?

I have a friend who talks a lot.  He is processing out loud, and in hearing what comes out of his mouth, he reaches new insights.  The “knowledge” may have been in his head and heart all the time, but the dots somehow connect better when words are spoken out loud.  It can be interesting to follow the meandering road he goes to get there, and it does require patience.

Should he be ashamed that this is how he processes?

Has it ever happened to you that you found the answer to a problem when you had to explain the problem to somebody you invited to help you solve it?  They didn’t say a word.  But they did help you – they created a wall for you to bounce off your thoughts.

What did you feel when that happened?  Sheepish?  Grateful?  Both?  And what did you feel if you were the bouncing wall?  Grateful to be trusted?  Amused?  Exploited – like somebody wasted your time?  If it is the first, why are we generally so afraid of asking for this kind of help?  Aren’t we depriving others from feeling trusted and useful when not asking?

I have other friends who don’t talk a lot.  But every time they open their mouth, it is pure genius coming out.  Evidently, they don’t need a bouncing wall.

I am worried that we are putting judgment on how people process their thoughts.  That unless our thoughts are so finished that they are “pure genius”, they are not to be uttered.  Because otherwise, it means we are speaking in less than straight, rational, and logical lines and eloquent whole sentences and then we are taking up space that is not rightfully ours.

Intelligent people, self-censoring because they are afraid their speaking patterns are not acceptable; that they must come across by a narrow definition of smart or they will be ignored or ridiculed; and that all that matters in the relationship is how eloquently they express their thoughts…  The very thought makes me sad – and ashamed for what I might have contributed to making anybody feel that way.  (Not much, I hope, as my own thinking is not exactly linear…)

What are we doing when we are actively not listening?

Well, if we are speaking because that is how we process, we are actually listening.  It may be that we are listening already up in the pink blubber where the words are formed and transported to the neurons responsible for moving our lips.  That could explain how speaking out loud can help even when we don’t have a bouncing wall in the form of another listener.  We engage more of our brain when we get the thoughts out – spoken or on paper – and in doing so we allow different synapses to fire than when we just think quietly.  Some people process better in longhand than on a keyboard. That, too, may be because they activate more well-connected brain circuits.

For the listeners that are not listening, one explanation may be hiding in this question from Rached Alimi: “How is it that we have enough memory to recall down to the smallest detail what happened to us, and not enough to remember how many times we have told it to the same person?”

Yup! I have been on both sides of this more times than I can count.  And I do wonder what is behind the resharing?

The thoughts are along the lines of:

• are we really telling the story to ourselves to affirm our identity in our own mind – the listener is just “a prop” in this show?
• do we need to convince the listener about something?
• do we need to tell a story to make sure that the other person is still there for us although this story is also who we are?
• is it a test of the story or the relationship?

OK, those are probably questions for myself when I am tempted to share a story, not remembering whether it might be a share or a reshare (or a re-reshare if you ask my children.)

The thing with stories we share – particularly the painful ones, the ones we share “to make sure that the other person is still there for us although this story is also who we are” – is that we may need to share them more than once to put in all the details.   The first share may be the “clean” version.  This happened.   And depending on how the listener reacts/responds, it may feel safe enough to share the story again later with a little more detail.

If, as listeners, we don’t listen fully because we think we already know the story, we may not pick up the added details.  If the story-teller sense that we are not listening, perhaps they don’t feel safe to add more details.   Or as listeners, we may go “Huh? That is not what you said last time you told me about this.”  Then what happens?  Can we hold space for the new details?  Do we feel lied to if the story changes?  Do we need an explanation why the story changed?  Does our own in-our-heads story about why the story has changed become more important than the storyteller’s story?  Does it change how we trust the storyteller in other aspects as well?

Too many questions without easy answers.

But the next time you catch yourself not listening, try to pay attention to where your mind has wandered.

Does what you hear send you down one of your own memory lanes?

Are you judging the speaker for not speaking in a manner you prefer?

Are you bored by their words?

Are you puzzled by their changed words and making up stories about that?

Do you feel defensive?

Are you getting your answers/retorts ready?

…

I have found that, normally,  when I care enough about the speaker, they can take all the time they need and repeat themselves if they need and my listening will be in service of them finding their own story.

All I need to do is care enough and the rest follows; the nodding, the body language, the mmming.  I don’t have to signal that I am listening when I am.

It is when I don’t care enough, I need the to-do lists.

And that holds a totally different and much harder question to sit with.