Learning How to Listen

I'm going to take a liberty here and relate a quote I found today to what we strive to do as coaches:

Author Ted Mooney described learning "how to look, and how to teach people to look":
If you stand in front of an artwork of even medium value, you really have to spend some time cleaning your mind of words utterly, and just begin to look, and keep yourself as blank as possible, for as long as possible, and you'll begin to see the relations of things, how they fit or don't, and eventually you'll be able to see the object whole, and then you can start letting words come in again, and they will be the right words. If you do the same thing on a street corner it works too, by the way.

I wonder if you agree with me that 'listening' can be another version of this description of how to look. After all, they are both sensory functions, 'listening' being the one we use more than 'looking.'

It takes something special with a language to describe a complex function in so few words. So with no permission from Mr. Mooney other than a faithful promise that I will only change the essential words involving seeing to listening, here goes...

"[H]ow to listen, and how to teach people to listen:

"If you hear the voice of someone from anywhere and from any social standing, you really have to spend some time cleaning your mind of words utterly, and just begin to listen, and keep yourself as blank as possible, for as long as possible, and you'll begin to 'see' (experience) the relations of things, how they fit or don't, and eventually you'll be able to hear the words as a connected whole, and then you can start letting words come in again, and they will be the right words. If you do the same thing on a street corner or in a group it works too, by the way."

Somehow this quote caught my attention, probably because I just wrote about 'routine housekeeping' as an activity of a coach. This quote says it better, at least in my opinion.

Like it? Does it speak to you?