A friend sits down by me at lunch and says, “I’m sick of this place. There’s no way anybody can get ahead here. The only people being promoted are friends of the management or college whiz kids like Peterson. It’s not fair.”
I say, “I hear you Jim. Why don’t you start taking night classes? You’re as smart as Peterson, you’re just not motivated or something.”
Do you hear the lack of acceptance in that response? Although I said the coworker is as smart as Peterson I tell him what to do as if he were so dumb he couldn’t figure it out for himself. Then I tell him there’s something wrong with him; he’s not motivated … or something. Not much understanding there is there?
Here’s a message that’s more about what my friend was saying and less about me, the listener. “You’re discouraged about your chances of promotion here.” In all likelihood Jim will feel understood. And, in all probability, that’s why he wanted to talk to me in the first place, not to be fixed or analyzed or handed some solution. Just understood. These “chats” that we have with people often go on for some time. In this case, my friend might respond with something like this: “Right, I’ll never get ahead unless I start sucking up like some of the guys or get qualified for the management training program.” In this case Jim already knows what he wants to do, get qualified for the company’s management training program. He just needs someone to bounce the ideas off of, to help him think things through by talking things through.
We all need people who will listen, who will give us what Carl Rogers referred to as minimal evaluative feedback and I call Active Listening. I doubt there is anything one can do that will build high quality relationships more rapidly or maintain them as solidly.
The big problem is that experiences, feelings, even thoughts cannot be communicated directly. I might, for instance, be sad but I can’t transmit my experience of sadness to you no matter how desperately I want to. My experiences stay inside and so do yours and everyone else’s.
Enter any gathering place, a bar, restaurant, auditorium, theater lobby, a gym and you’re likely to come to the conclusion that everyone talks and talks, that we are all surrounded by talk. But is anyone listening? If you polled people in any of those well-known bars or other talking places I’m sure they’d respond positively. Yes, everyone listens. Well, don’t they? Sure. We listen to television and radio. We listen to friends, spouses, sons and daughters. We listen to music and plays. We listen to colleagues, employees, supervisors, customers and consultants. It seems like we listen to everybody.
But do we? Or is it just hearing?
One of our trainers for our leadership training program, told me that she was recently sitting in an airport lounge waiting for a flight when she overheard a tense conversation between a mother and her five or six year old daughter. It went something like this:
Daughter: But I don’t want to get on the plane. I don’t want to go. I want to go home.
Mother: You’re being a big baby.
Daughter: I’m not either. I just don’t want to go on the plane.
Mother: Well, you’re going to go whether you like it or not. So just shut up.
Daughter: I could call daddy. He could come and get me and take me home.
Mother: (grabs the daughter and pushes her into a seat) Now sit there and shut up. You’re not going to call anyone. You’re going with me to Grandma’s house and that’s IT. So shut UP!
“Fortunately for my state of mind,” she said, “my plane was ready for boarding and I left the lounge and a teary little girl with an angry mother. But at 33,000 feet I kept replaying that mother-daughter scenario, wondering what might have happened had the mother tried to understand her daughter’s feelings.” My guess is that the little girl was afraid to fly and, if she’d picked up on it, the mother might have said something like “You’re really scared about getting on the plane. You’d rather stay home.” I suspect that just acknowledging the little girl’s feelings might have dispelled them.
I doubt that upset mother in the airport waiting room is reading this [blog] but you are and I want to share with you some of the things I’ve learned about listening, what works and what doesn’t. Let’s start at the beginning—Stay tuned for more in the next blog coming very, very soon.