Silence, Discernment & the Art of Listening II |
Monday May 07 2007
By Stu Whitley
Bio
This post is second in a three-part series.
In our relationships, as with our work, listening is absolutely fundamental to leadership and the discipline of effective communication. This includes the need to be alert for situations where cocking one’s ear to the rhythms of speech, as well as its content, will ensure better understanding. To do this in the context of conversation means to project positive non-verbal behaviour, to avoid being captured by words that we know can provoke negative emotions, by not interrupting, and by silently analyzing as dialogue proceeds.
When witnesses testify, when judges speak, when communities express concern, or when a victim expresses doubt, we sometimes—often—hear only what we want to hear, and dismiss the rest. In doing so, we overlook the lesson of one of the primal aboriginal teachings: to hear the most important part of the message, it is necessary to hear with the eyes and the heart. There is a passage from T.S. Eliot that in particular commends itself to this subject:
There’s always something
one’s ignorant of
About anyone, however well
one knows them;
And that may be something of
The greatest importance.
one’s ignorant of
About anyone, however well
one knows them;
And that may be something of
The greatest importance.
In the 17th century, Francis Bacon tried to move critical analysis away from scholasticism and the renaissance fascination with ancient wisdom by identifying cognitive obstacles to clear thinking. There were four such barriers, or “idols” as he termed them, which impaired our ability to observe or listen:
- Idols of the cave, which are individual peculiarities
- Idols of the marketplace, which are the limits of language
- Idols of the theatre, or pre-existing beliefs that tend to script how we react to things, and
- Idols of the tribe, which are
inherited foibles of human
thought.
An interesting cognitive disability is the ‘impostor syndrome’, characterized by a pervasive feeling that one is scamming everyone else about one’s skills and competencies. Oddly, it can drive people to over-compensate, causing them to be high achievers. But more often, there is a risk that such people will hear criticism in the tone or messages of colleagues that is not there.
Similarly, we tend to see ourselves in a better light than others see us (the ‘self-serving bias’). We often, quite naturally, attribute higher motives to ourselves than those which move other people. Unconscious bias in the listening context can be overcome by empathy, which I consider to be one of the principal hallmarks of the mature adult. Self-awareness is another.
Bacon eloquently observed that “…the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their time incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not deterred and reduced.”
© 2007 Stuart James Whitley. All
rights reserved.
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