“Do You Understand the Words That are Coming Out of My Mouth??”
If you heard Chris Tucker’s high pitched voice in Rush Hour as you read the title, good. As he and Jackie Chan meet for the first time, he assumes that his Hong Kongese counterpart speaks no English, hence the overly obnoxious and patronizing tone. There are times in my life though where I find myself wanting to yell these exact words at certain people. People who, even if we speak the same language, don’t seem to know how to LISTEN.
Listening is one of the most underrated of skills, one of the most overlooked of skills. It seems like most people equate our sense of hearing with our ability to listen. But listening goes beyond the physical act of hearing and entails so much more than the understanding of the words coming from the other person’s mouth.
Often, what I’ve certainly been guilty of and what I’ve observed other people do instead of listening is in fact a superficial version of it, which can include judging, appropriating, or dismissing. Sometimes, listening is also disguised as waiting – waiting until the person is done so we can blurt out what’s racing through our mind, or not even, sometimes we flat out interrupt because we just can’t keep our impulses under control. That used to be me! I used to constantly try to finish other people’s sentences; not because I wanted to be rude, but because I wanted to communicate that I understood where the person was coming from. Bad! Bad habit.
Although our physical presence and silence can appear as listening, there are so many more layers and components to it than the average person might realize.
- Eye contact and body language.
First of all, if we’re on our phone commenting on our news feed while someone is speaking to us, we are NOT listening. If our eyes and body are occupied elsewhere, I don’t know, like if we’re banging on melons and sniffing for sweetness at the grocery store, or focused on scrubbing the grime from the shower, we are also NOT listening.
True listening requires presence. To begin, I’d say that an important part of that is expressed through our body language — minimal movement, relaxed stance or posture, eyes on the person speaking.
I mean, sure, it’s possible to be listening and doing something else at the same time, but if true listening was happening, then it’s certain that the other activity may be affected. I don’t believe in multi-tasking. If more than one thing is taking place at the same time, our senses and abilities are split. Neither one thing nor the other has our undivided attention, which in my books, doesn’t count as doing a good job.
- After we have our eye contact and body language in place, it gets a little more complex. As we take in the words being shared by the other person, as we attempt to identify the feelings and emotions attached to them, we want to remember to stay focused on the other person’s experience.
True listening is all about understanding and seeing the situation from the speaker’s perspective, not from our own. And from my personal observations, this is the single most difficult thing for many of us to do — we are so attached to our own worldview and the filters that project how we perceive life that it’s hard for us to really capture what another person is living, breathing, thinking, feeling. All too often, we allow our own stories and experiences to cloud our ability to see and hear the person as they are.
If we want to engage in true listening, we must learn to detach from ourselves and do our best to hold a space for the person sharing, welcoming their experience and being open enough to accept unconditionally. True listening is unconditional acceptance.
When we listen with unconditional acceptance, we do NOT want to:
- Judge the person’s experience as good or bad
- Dismiss the thoughts and feelings being expressed
- Compare the other’s experience to our own
- Interject our thoughts, advice, or comments (unless solicited)
When we listen with unconditional acceptance, we DO want to :
- Be physically present with our eye contact and body language
- Be curious and ask questions to deepen our understanding
- Acknowledge the person’s thoughts and feelings
- Confirm our understanding of the situation by paraphrasing every so often
- Share our own experience only if solicited; or we can ask if sharing is appropriate
When listening to a friend talk about her experience at work, I was once told that my empathizing was coming off as aggravating (I said, “that sucks” when hearing about a situation that I was judging as less than ideal). At that moment, I was taken aback at her comment, but I understood that for my friend to feel truly heard, I really needed to abstain from any personal judgment of the situation.
What I’m suggesting aren’t hard rules. Yeah, of course we’ll naturally want to comment here and there, or react to some extent to the information being shared, but what’s important is that we don’t take away from the person’s experience by imposing our own. In my opinion, true listening is basically giving the floor to the other person for them to pour their heart out without us stealing the show.
If we’re engaging in a very mundane conversation about what we had for breakfast or our latest Netflix binge then by all means, judge away, throw in your 2 cents, just be human enough to gauge when the topic of conversation is more personal/sensitive. Sometimes, all we want is someone to bear witness to what we are going through and that is enough. Other times, this isn’t the case, and our conversations can carry on without so much thought. It’s just a matter of paying attention and communicating our needs.
To learn more about our listening skills, I recommend watching this video with Otto Scharmer, founder of the Presencing Institute. In 8 minutes, he breaks down listening into 4 levels, encouraging us to open up our hearts and minds:
There’s also a quote by Thich Nhat Hanh where he describes what he calls deep listening. I’ve shared it before on my page and I will share it again. Every time I read it, it resonates so profoundly. Maybe it will stir something up for you too:
Deep listening is the kind of listening that can help relieve the suffering of the other person. You can call it compassionate listening. You listen with only one purpose: Help [them] to empty their heart. Remember that you are helping [them] to suffer less, and even if they say things full of wrong perceptions, full of bitterness, you are still capable of continuing to listen with compassion. If you want to help them correct their perception, you wait for another time; you just listen with compassion and help [them] suffer less. One hour like that can bring transformation and healing.
Who would’ve thought that listening could go THAT deep! Well, it can, way beyond just understanding the words coming out of the other person’s mouth. True listening, if practiced mindfully, can reach into the depths of the soul and do so much for a person who is in need.
