Many times
the biggest help you can be
is to turn a listening ear towards another
to hear everything they have to say
no matter how troubling how painful how confusing
to give up for a while
being another judge, another critic, another fixer of troubles
to be a welcome to all of it
all of it
and in your seeing and hearing embrace
find out how healing
being witness can be
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As well as missing out 'yes' or 'no' at great cost to ourselves and others, we can fall into familiar ways of interpreting what others say when we ask for support.Some of us habitually interpret a yes from someone else as if it were no - leading to endless checking and rechecking, micro-managing and over-supervising, or just doing it ourselves. It erodes trust and soon leads to the people who might have once said a genuine yes holding back.Others habitually take no to mean yes - forcing or cajoling those around us into begrudgingly or resentfully doing what we've asked. This also undoes trust, undermining commitment and the genuine willingness to be of assistance.We make the same mistake with counter-offers, assuming when the other person offers to do something a little different from what we've asked that they mean either no, or that their objections are petty and to be ignored.This is important because when requests, and their responses, are handled with genuineness and attention it's possible to build deep bonds of understanding, fluid, generous support - vital in any relationship, family, or team. And when we wilfully misunderstand what is being said we quickly undo all of this.The antidote to our habitual misunderstanding? Learning to listen to what the other person is actually saying rather than to the familiarity of our own inner story.
It’s amazing how often we assume our requests can be heard while ignoring the capacity of others to listen to what we’re asking.Some examples:You made a request by email
If your recipient didn’t read it, didn’t see it, or is overwhelmed by emails and messages, as so many people are, you probably don’t have a listener, no matter how many times you insist that you’ve asked, or how sure you are that they should have read what you said.
You asked at a time when the other person couldn't pay attention
If they’re busy, anxious, fearful, or distracted then just because you’ve spoken, again, doesn't mean you have a listener. Even asking someone face to face who is distracted this way does not guarantee they have any capacity to hear you.
You assumed the other person should be interested in what you have to say simply because of who you are
Your seniority, fame, position of authority, sense of yourself as interesting or important are no guarantee anyone is listening. Neither is being a parent or a partner or the boss. Assuming you do is a route to many difficulties.
Can you think of times you might have asked when there’s no listener available, even if the request seems obvious to you? And if so, what might you do to make it possible for people to genuinely hear you?You might need to think about timing, place, tone and the medium through which you make your request, as well as the mood of your request (sincerity, cynicism, frustration). All of these will have an impact on others’ capacity to listen.If you find yourself thinking “I’ve asked them time and time again, but nothing ever seems to happen” you might well still be assuming you have a listener when you don’t.And now you have a place where you can look to resolve your difficulty.
When we divide what's 'inside' us from what's 'outside' as if they were separate from one another we cause ourselves all kinds of difficulty.In much of our culture we treat working with what's 'inside' as if it's irrelevant, an indulgence, soft, a waste of time when compared with the hands on world of making, doing, deciding and acting. And we can become equally convinced by the opposite position - that we can't act until we've completely resolved some feeling or inner difficulty, or until we've studied and understood a subject from end to end.But inside and outside are a continuum, different aspects or angles on the same world. It might be most helpful to think of 'inside' primarily as that corner of things of which each of us has a particularly special, privileged view - and part of the world nevertheless.And so it is the case that the way I relate to others is very often the way I'm already relating to parts of myself. And that the way I struggle within myself is the self-same way I struggle with other people.And it's often the case that powerful 'inner' work is done 'outside' - for example by developing skill in relating to others I also develop skill in relating to myself. And that there are many riches to discover about the 'outside' world by the much undervalued art of listening attentively and with deep curiosity to the inner experience of others.
It's one thing to have good intentions about your relationships with others.You also need good practices to bring them about, repeated actions by which you
listenpay attentionstay open or defend yourselfshare your cares and commitmentschoose what to say and what not sayrespond to emotionsinterpret events as they happen.
When the practices that connect you to one another are neglected, relationships atrophy. At first slowly. And then quickly. Before long nobody can point to the moment when the trouble started nor to what it is that is missing. It's just that something necessary isn't there, something that once brought this team, this family, this organisation alive.And then it becomes easy to judge others and blame them for making things so hard. And to forget that it's how you're acting right now that's keeping things the way they are.Restoring relationships calls for more than wishful thinking, and certainly for more than blaming others. It requires waking up to the actions that genuinely connect people.And it requires remembering, a central act of all leadership: recovering the very ways of speaking and listening that once supported you, and bringing them purposefully back into being all over again.
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It's when we actually listen to another human being that they get to be human too. Listening allows a shift from I-It relating in which the other is essentially an object to us (an irritation, a way to get what I want, a way to feel good about myself) to I-You relating, in which the other gets to be a person.As Martin Buber points out, I-It relating is essentially a form of It-It relating, since it's impossible for us to show up as full human beings, even to ourselves, when we are in the midst of making another, or a group of others, into a thing. To relate to another in an I-You way, to listen to them in their fullness, bestows dignity on everyone and opens wide horizons for understanding, compassion, truthfulness, and relationship.Listening ought to be the easiest thing to do. After all, it requires no complex framework, no technique, no technology. And yet it can be so, so hard.Most of us have a lot of practicing to do in order to drop our need to be right, to be ‘the one’, to be liked, and to hear only what we want to hear. In order to listen we have to relax our defensiveness, be skilful with the inner attacks of our own inner critic (which is ready to judge us even when there's no judgement coming from the speaker), get over our wish to control everything, and be willing to welcome whatever we experience. We have to be able to question our own stories and accounts, be open to seeing things in a whole new way, and quiet our inner world sufficiently that what is being said can reach us. And we have to learn how to be in contact with ourselves, a fundamental prerequisite for being in contact with others.Perhaps all of this is why real listening is so absent in our fearful, impatient culture. And why we could all benefit from doing some inner work if we want to do the vital outer work of listening well to the people around us.
Photography by Justin Wise
Our capacity to imagine allows us to convince ourselves that we know other people - their intentions, their wishes, their inner worlds - when we hardly know them at all. But what we are sure we know can so easily turn out to be simply what we've invented. And once we're sure, we quickly discount evidence to the contrary, reinforcing what we've imagined by the selective way in which we look and listen.We can imagine grudges and resentments, frustrations and slights, judgements and failings, hurts and distances, all without even once checking that they are true. And we can go for years, thinking we know others, when what we know is our story about them.We do this with lovers and enemies, children and parents, siblings and friends, colleagues and acquaintances. We do this with people whose culture is different from our own, people who live or speak differently from us, people who vote differently.And all of it feels so real.There is one simple, and difficult, and necessary way to address the suffering, distance and estrangement that comes from our imaginings, and that is to listen.Simple, because all of us are able to ask another 'please, tell me about yourself, tell me what I need to know in order to understand you more fully'. We can do this with loved ones, with work colleagues, and across seemingly unresolvable divides. And we can start today, even if we have never had such a conversation before. All it takes is a willingness to be present and to hear, fully, what the other has to say.Difficult, because listening in this way means we have to drop our defensiveness, our wish to hear things only on our terms, our fear that we won't like what is said. We have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable, available, open. This is not the same as giving up our own way of seeing the world or simply doing what another person asks, but it does require allowing ourselves to be changed by the encounter. And this calls on us to summon up reserves of courage and grace and compassion, and to give up being in control all the time.And necessary because our imaginings so easily act as a wedge between us, prolonging our difficulties, denying us the creative and nourishing possibilities of relationship, and blinding us to suffering as well as to the light and goodness that is in us and all around us if we'll only look.
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So much of our difficulty with relationships comes because we're projecting onto others what we won't see in ourselves.
So you get angry and frustrated with a colleague because she's tentative and hesitant, without seeing that it's a cause of anger (rather than compassion or curiosity) precisely because you're angry at all the ways that you are tentative and hesitant.
Or you get furious with your partner for leaving the kitchen table in a mess, not so much because of the mess but because your inner critic is eating into you for all the ways you struggle to keep things neat and in line.
Or you fall in love with another's creativity and spontaneity, all the while because he reflects back to you all your own creativity and spontaneity with which you've lost touch.
Or you feel afraid of an entire group of people because they remind you of what you're afraid about in yourself.
Our projections - if they illuminate anything about other people at all - leave so much of their true beauty and complexity shrouded in darkness, so that we're often relating to what we project rather than to who they are.None of this is so unusual. But it can be a huge source of difficulty and suffering for us. Because behind our projections is another human being, different from us, confounding, surprising, and worthy of both curiosity and wonder. Behind all our projections is another who we are sure we know, but perhaps barely know at all. And behind all our projections are aspects of ourselves - gifts and suffering - that we're sure are out there in the world, but are in fact right here if we'll only turn towards them and look.
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The kind of tiredness that tells us we don't want to be here isn't just a private, personal matter.How many meetings have you been in when it seems like everyone is tired in this way, but nobody is saying? And how many times have you pushed on, resigned to the pointlessness of the conversation, determined to keep going in the hope that it will help it be over more quickly?Over a decade ago, before I knew how to work with any of this productively, I was in just such a meeting. On a hot July morning, around a kitchen table, we made a decision to commit the company I co-founded to a multi-year project that would require all of our energy and most of our remaining resources. What I remember most was how the conversation felt - like walking through hot, sticky treacle, or wading through mud. Speaking was difficult, listening was harder, and mustering a 'yes' for what we were deciding to do, harder still. And what made it most difficult was the sense that others in the room were experiencing the same heavy tiredness but keeping it quiet. It doesn't surprise me that the project didn't work out well.What I came to see sometime afterwards was how powerful it could have been for any of us to say what we were experiencing, to ask 'how does it feel, right now, to be having this conversation?', and then to be curious about the response. We might quickly have learned about the reservations many of us had, about how we were trying to hide them in order to avoid conflict, and about how much life was missing from this particular project that might have been expressed - productively, willingly - in another.Tiredness like this in a meeting can very often show us that we're avoiding something, or trying to make a commitment that's not sincere. And if we'd known this - and acted upon it rather than pretending all was ok - we might have given ourselves a chance to dedicate our efforts over the following two years towards a project that really mattered to us, one that would have brought our our fullest, most whole-hearted commitment and with it, inevitably, our most generous, creative response.
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Seen against the ever-present certainties of our lives – we will die, we will grow old, all that we build or create will eventually fall apart – differences between us drop away. We are all the same.It’s so hard to live consciously with this in mind, to reach out across the space we imagine separates us and be open to one another. So hard to share our fear, our longing, our truest hopes. So hard to stay present long enough to look deeply into the eyes of others, to fall into them, allowing ourselves to know and be known.Why so difficult? Perhaps because of the shame we necessarily picked up along the way: sharpened every time we had to be told not to do this or that, to be this way or that way in order to fit in with our families or with our culture. Because of our self-doubt and our inner-criticism, which make it so hard to love ourselves fully (a pre-requisite for allowing ourselves to un-self-consciously love others). And because we are afraid.And so we hold back, always reserving some distance even from those who love us the most, because that way it feels as if we’ll hold on to some measure of safety. Or we judge others, resent them or hate them, turning them into less than human-beings in our hearts, because it makes us feel better for a while.Even though we know that our deepest connection with one another is precisely that which can save us from the void.This is the great ethical work, so difficult to do and so necessary, which calls to us – learning the sensitivity to respond and be open to other people, who we take to be so different from us but with whom we share common ancestry, and common destiny.For we are intimately related.Family.
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