Using the Arts to Learn How to Listen

You will find many ways to practice listening and hearing what is being communicated.

For me, listening to music evokes something in me that’s greater than just the music itself. Like all art, there’s the composer and performer that "speak" to us. What a perfect opportunity to listen to what each wants us to hear. For example, Jean Sibelius' 2nd Symphony speaks to me of not only exquisite beauty through the sounds alone, but even more of the lush country called Finland that he said he wanted to "paint" with his music.

Perhaps you can listen to the visual or tactile arts. How might you do that? Well, as I see it, your rapt attention to the work of art is a way you listen to your own experience from within yourself. What an ideal way to pratice listening without judgment! If you find yourself becoming a critic of the art, stop and contemplate what it might be like to "listen" to the artist without judgment.

When all is said and done, the pleasure and delight in all of art is that the beholder/listener decides in some mysterious way what is pleasurable and delightful. For those who listen without judgment (is it good art or do I like it), whatever is present may have a chance to come through to you, to me, to anyone. It takes practice.

Listening without judgment or your own mental model of what should be, takes conscious thought and deliberate practice, just as does anything worth learning to do well.

Take the Filters Off

Today I experienced listening to a coach who was not listening to the client. Somewhere in all the angst of an exam, the coach began to assume what the client was asking to work on rather than finding out ... or better yet, hearing the client's explicit wish.

I know this coach is much better at the skill of listening than this conversation revealed. However, it brought to mind that if a highly trained "listener" can miss the point, how easy it is for a lay person to struggle with basic communication.

Listening is an action, hearing is the result of listening. When I want to be heard, I am asking you to listen carefully, keenly, actively. I have something to communicate to you. So it is with our coaching clients. Let's put it this way, when I am listening to my own inner dialogue, how in the world can I also be listening to you? When a coach listens to either their own issues (often via the issue of the client) or has a mental model of how things should be, the client is not being heard, no matter how plaintiff the request. It was that way today.

Think about how you listen. Are you open completely? Did you take off the filters of judgment, opinion and knowledge? This is key as listening is the technique cornerstone of coaching.

Storylines

From my 4-D Systems project with NASA, I work with a concept called “storylines” … not unique actually but highly effective for making changes because changing them is not very difficult. It has to do with listening. I’m going to say boldly and without reservation that when we speak we listen to what we say … mostly. If that is so, then our brains react to what we say. Here are examples:

I dread Mondays.
Teenagers are always trouble.
I love my work.
No one understands me.
I don’t think I’ll ever be good at managing people.
My boss doesn’t like me.
It’s a beautiful day today.
I don’t like people with different accents.
Travel broadens my perspective.
I’ll never make enough money.

Take a look at each statement. Which ones will limit you in some way? Which ones will encourage or inspire you in some way?

Now take those that limit you and change each to be a statement that encourages or inspires you. Here’s an example:

“I dread Mondays” is seriously limiting to your possible productivity or enjoyment of the entire coming week (at the least). Trust me it is. It’s a script destined for your perpetual unhappiness. Listen to it. Say it again. Listen to it. Now take it and change it to a storyline that will encourage or inspire you. “It’s Monday and it’s going to be a great week.” That’s one version. You could say to your self “I like Mondays” as a first step. At least you’ll get yourself to neutral and begin the change what you listen to.

Being Impatient

How do we listen during times of added excitement, stress, distraction?

For one thing, I tend to become impatient during these times ... indicating I'm listening to myself and not to you or my client. Impatience is an interesting behavior of mine ... sort of a reinforcing "I know , I know" so get on with it 'cause I don't have the time to listen to anyone else. I think of times when my impatience is an outward indicator of my inward bad mood. Since I don't often think I'm in a bad mood, where does this all come together? Perhaps as I get older I find myself less and less impatient with others; I hope this is true.

What does impatience look like to you? Is this one of your behaviors? And what does it have to do with coaching?

Well, it has plenty to do with coaching. For one thing, being impatient takes away from being present to another person, to the conversation itself. When I'm listening to myself and not to my client I can scarcely be an effective coach.

How do we listen when we're learning a new set of skills, such as coaching?

Being impatient has an effect on a person's ability to listen completely. What I mean by that is what I hear far too often in coaching exams and mentoring: the coach steps over what client is saying in order to perhaps move the conversation along, to think of the next question to ask, or to prejudge what the client is trying to say. Impatience is the best possible example of a coach who hasn't quite yet aquired a decent level of coaching skill. Early in my coaching career I was often impatient, being a "know it all."

'Impatience' it not one of the words I've contemplated previously in connection with coaching. However, it is the behavior that underlies what I would call early-level coaching when uncertainty and "trying to do it right" are the markers. What suffers is the essential coaching competency called "Active Listening."

Many Reasons to Listen

To whom shall we listen? I just completed the account of Barack Obama's winning Presidential campaign. When I read I look for the underlying principles of that activity or situation. This approach applies to mysteries, novels, non-fiction ... everything: to what shall I "listen" and what is there to learn?

It occurs to me that I listen powerfully only after I know why and what I'm listening for ... that includes what I'm interested in, want to know about, or even to discover something entirely new. For a coach, listening is the key coaching technique ... how else can we have the conversation and explore what the client wishes.

Back to the campaign account ... there's a lot to learn or re-learn in this well-written book: The Audacity to Win. David Plouffe clearly articulates how the core management team (along with the candidate) created a strategy, tested it in Iowa (for a win nobody predicted), and stayed with the strategy even in the face of naysayers. I don't mean to laud being stubborn ... not at all. Events demanded decisions and some re-direction but the original strategy was never changed.

What does that mean for you and me? We coaches seem to gravitate to marketing solutions of every kind and promise ... to a fault, actually. The best strategy is to pick one and go for it with a realistic optimism and hard work. That's all that works ... there's no magic to building a successful coaching practice. Wishing won't make it so.

I started this blog with the concept of listening. The result of listening powerfully is to make smart decisions (for our own practices) and to really hear what the client wants all the while picking up the clues that reveal the client's underlying limits.

Listening to the Past

My work now is to listen keenly and listen for what is said or not said. It wasn’t always that way, of course. (I’m talking about coaching and the listening skills required.)

I went back to my HS reunion recently and brought with me my acquired skills since those days eons ago. I felt an amazing sense of appreciation for those I met and spoke with … actually it’s clear I was listening to people. With 300 out of 800 in our class, sitting down to dinner with three women I knew from the second grade on was thoroughly delightful.

What was it about my school days that might be valuable now? Well truthfully, and the truth is at best interesting, I wasn’t listening to anyone other than myself during that time in my life. I was consumed by what others would think about me. My parents made less and less sense as I grew into my teen years. I didn't listen to them either.

I learned this a while ago and experienced it yet again: We keep people in place as we last “listened to our own opinions about them.” My reunion was more interesting because I knew this about how we remember: we remember how we listened (once upon a time). My surprises were that people who hadn’t seen or heard of me in 50 years remembered (almost to a person) that I was “shy, smart and headed for success.” I remembered myself as “not quite good enough, a failure then.” My script therefore was how I listened to myself and never how anyone else listened to me. Clearly, for the earliest days of my life, no matter what the facts (I was a straight-A student), all I heard in my VOJ (voice of judgment) was that I didn’t succeed and wasn’t going to make it unless I worked really hard (at what I did not know then).

More on listening next time ...

Time to Speak

It has been way too long since I wrote on my own blog.

There are issues in professional coaching that have been on my plate for the past several months. To be heard on the subject I began communicating on LinkedIn regarding the ICF credentialing challenge.

What I want to do is renew writing on my blog.

In the interim I've also been on Twitter with over 1,000 Tweets. This is fun but it keeps me off balance. Nonetheless it is the most informative source I've ever known. I keep up with politics and science especially. So, Twitter and LinkedIn plus the daily news sources will remain in my world but not as the only communication I enjoy.

Time for completing the communication process. Time to speak.