
¿Active Listening?
Today we hear lots about listening to others. If you do a quick search on Google, you can find articles that show from 6 to 9 different ways to do it. All of this articles mention what is called “Active Listening” which they swear will help us listen “everything” -whatever “everything” means-, with attention, in an empathic way, trying to understand others, being present, without bias.
I believe that “Active Listening” as it is described doesn’t exist. There’s no way for us to listen without bias. We are constantly building reality constructions and there’s no exception with the sound waves we hear through our Auditive System and transform into electromagnetic signals that we send to our brain so it can decode them.
Am I Interested?
You may be surprised, but the most important thing about listening is being interested in whatever you are listening. It’s just that our mind has a mechanism that normally invites us to be “disinterested” on what we are listening. This is only about managing the world’s complexity.
So the first thing that the brain listens is something that “sounds familiar”, so it associates this with something that is already in its reference warehouse (we’ll call this warehouse the Reality Construction System) then, it sends a tiny message to the brain saying something like: “Relax, you already know this, you can pay attention to something else.”
Plus, it is normal that through the process of socializing we learn to feel “good and valuable” if we know everything, so we are closed to listening “interesting facts” others might know because interesting means something that’s new for me, different from what I already know, or even unknown, and this can be an invitation to see ourselves as “fools”, “incompetent”, or “not enough”.
If this wasn’t enough, human beings like feeling safe. Because safe means I know how to behave in my environment with its stimuli and therefore I can take care of myself and my life. Usually what is “unknown” is not necessarily an invitation to feel safe, so for a mere survival mechanism our mind tries to “prove” the information we already know, even it needs to “change a little bit its meaning”.
Then, How Can We Make Things More Interesting?
It doesn’t depend on the information you are getting, although we all might think it does. It depends on how you look at the world, whether you look at it with discovery eyes or with “I already know this and I feel safe eyes”.
Some of this ideas can be useful to you:
If everything you hear makes you think: “I know…” Maybe it would be nice if you ask yourself: “What’s new or different about this? What’s distracting me?” This will invite your mind to pay attention to discover this.
Another chance is for you to pay attention to your body language. Any signal that your mind identifies as “danger” will make one of your body elements light up. Your breathing gets faster, you sweat, or start being uneasy in your chair. Besides what everyone says there aren’t patterns, there are statistics, meaning a certain group of people might have a reaction, and a different group might have a different reaction. Please, don’t asume, the reference or model of anybody else, find out yours, and then, you might include yourself in the statistics of a certain model. When this “body trigger” ignites itself you’ll probably try to protect yourself going back to “I know…” If you pay attention, you have the chance to ask yourself again: “What makes me feel unsafe?”. Your mind will open the possibilities and distinctions can help you listen with more presence.
Finally, something that will always invite you to be present, pay attention, and discover what’s new is being clear about the reason you are sitting there, listening. What do you want to achieve in this conversation? The unclearer your purpose is the easier you’ll lose interest, you’ll get distracted, stop being present, and won’t pay attention to your body language. So you can ask yourself: “What am I doing here? What for?”
You’ll always listen what you are willing to listen, no what others say… so, be patient with yourself, and if you hear something that isn’t useful for what you want to build, it’s ok, just listen again.
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