Listening Now Blog

We had such a successful reception to the series of posts from Birdy Diamond on Listening Currency (and if you missed them, you can check in here to catch up) that we decided to finish 2010 with a special Hollydayze post.  Birdy specialises in encouragement and encouraging – and if there’s a time of year when all of us need a little more of that, it’s now!

Thank you Birdy for offering this post – please enjoy this week’s special guest post.

Listening at and through the hollydays (why yes, this is a non-denominational made-up word. Thank you for noticing! ) can be especially difficult.

 In addition to the noise and clutter of everyday living, at the hollydays you also have all the additional input of social gatherings, music, fun, etc.

 It can be a great time! It can also be way too much.

 Here are some thoughts on how to keep your peace, serenity, and listening power through the hollydays and beyond.

 1. Build in some quiet time for yourself.

It might seem paradoxical in a blog about listening to talk about NOT listening, but it is vital to give yourself some time away from auditory input if you don’t want everything to just blur out in one gigantic hum. (Or otherwise explode from the sheer mass of input available.)

 Find a space where you can be quietly by yourself.

 Make sure that your nearest and dearest understand that this time is for you, and you alone. There are no interruptions except for genuine emergencies. Period.

 Use this quiet time in whatever way works best for you. Meditation can be good, as can simply resting. And contemplating nature is a lovely thing to do at any season. The point is to find whatever works for you. Whatever lets you emerge recharged and refreshed.

2. Establish rules beforehand whenever possible.

Determine how much and when you are willing to listen, then convey those boundaries gently but firmly to your nearest and dearest. Want to go listen to the caroling, but aren’t up to the hours of listening involved at the company party? Then say so.

 Want to go to your best friend’s hollyday party, but aren’t up to the community sing of “The Messiah” this year? Then say so.

 Remember, it’s your listening currency, and at the end of the day, you and you alone get to decide how you are going to spend it.

This isn’t to say that it will always be easy, and that there won’t be some compromising involved. But if you want a stress-free hollyday time, it’s a line that absolutely needs to be drawn.

3. Understand that you can’t do or listen to everything.

There is so much goodness around at this time of year:

Family

Friends

Religious Observances

Art

Music

Socializing

It can be difficult to choose where you want to spend your time and your listening.

Again, it is beyond the scope of this post or of this blog to make those decisions for you, but I am suggesting that freeing yourself from unreasonable expectations, especially the self-imposed kind, can go a long way toward having a more peaceful listening experience over the hollydays.

And yes, I also know that it’s easier said than done. It’s still a valuable investment in your peace of mind.

4. Make clear your tolerance for discord.

No one is perfect. Disagreements crop up from time to time. Part of the whole human equation and a’that.

However, there are also those out there who will try to turn you into a human punching bag, or who simply want someone to whine and moan to day in and day out.

While always a good idea to set strict limits with this kind of person (see the article on A Dozen Ways to Save for more examples), it is even more useful to do so at the hollydays, when you are not only wanting to enjoy your own everyday life, but also the special activities that come with this time of year.

5. Keep your perspective.

The last suggestion I have for you today is also the most important: keep your perspective.

Perfection is not required.

Choices don’t have to be hard or irrevocable. Flexibility is not a four-letter word. Neither is patience.

 Practice the art of lovingly letting go.

 And when you make mistakes, as you will, practice lovingly letting them go too.

 Have a happy and blessed Hollyday Season!

-Birdy Diamond

About the Author: Birdy Diamond & her husband Mike, teach people about wonder, words and progress at their growing collection of websites comprising The Avian Empire: An Encouraging Bird, CrowTarot Tours and  Mysticphoenyx Cafe .

I’ve done a lot of home renovation in my time.  I may not look it, but I’m actually a very handy person.  I’ve scraped wallpaper, painted walls, shovelled old floor tiles up, and a host of other physical tasks that have led to the beautification of the property.

The thing about renovations is the preparation is what takes all the time.  Let’s say you want to paint a room.  The actual painting, where you dip your brush into the paint and apply it to the walls, is the easiest bit.  The fun bit.  The quickest bit. 

It’s all the activities that precede that that take the time.  Sanding, sugarsoaping, filling holes, and that’s assuming the walls were painted before.  If you’ve never spent a day scraping wallpaper off kitchen walls you haven’t really lived.  A steamer in one hand and a scraper in the other — who needs pricey facial spa treatments when one has those actrouements of the trade at hand?

In the renovations that I’ve been involved in, it’s tempting to skip the preparation.  Those jobs are not fun ones.  They seem to take far longer than they should.  They’re dirtier, grimier, yuckier.  And you often can’t see the outcome of your labours – it’s just a sandpapered wall for cripes sake!  It’s only when you get to the fun part, the rewarding part, where the paint goes on that you realise the value of all that preparation.  And you’re glad that you did it.

This got me to thinking about preparing to listen.  Do we need to prepare to listen?  Most other true skills involve some form of preparation.  Are you a copywriter?  Then you need to prepare to write well — you don’t just stumble from your bed to the keyboard without some form of limbering up. 

Are you a speaker?  Then you need to prepare to speak well — limbering up your voice, going over your key points, relaxing your facial muscles and shoulders. 

Are you a leader?  Then you need to prepare to lead well – learning about your people, understanding the principles that underlie people dynamics, improving your self-awareness.

So it makes sense to prepare to listen, right?  To do some limbering up to get you in the groove of the listening about to come.  What might be some of the ways we can prepare to listen?  Here’s my list:

• clear your mind of your own stuff.  Whatever it is you were thinking about before you started to listen, put it to one side.  Know that it’ll be there when you return to it.  But for now – put it away.  Create an open space for the person to speak and truly be heard.
• be in your body.  Connecting with your physical state, usually via breathing, is one of the quickest ways to become present
• allow for the possibility of being changed by what you hear.  This might mean a change in your attitude, your feelings or your thoughts and beliefs.  This is the single most important attitude you can adopt to truly listen:  the possibility of being changed by what you hear
• move into Jedi listening mode.  Focus.  Be patient.  Encourage.  Simple words, but so powerful when applied.  Jedi listeners transform the space they occupy
• remove distractions.  This includes technology and time.
• pay attention to what is happening to you, as the listener.  This is the often missed step that creates magical listening.  Who you are — how you’re showing up and who you’re being – affects the quality of the conversation, big time.  

Let me know what you believe the keys to listening preparation are.  I’m interesting.  And yes, I’m listening.

Willie Hewes has a fascinating work life.  She produces fabulous illustrations and calls herself a monster whisperer.  When she asked me about publishing a post on monsters and listening, I couldn’t resist.   Please enjoy this guest post by Willie Hewes.

Monster Listening

Do you listen to your monsters? Your monsters, you know, the mean voices of your mind, the ones that scold you when you mess up, remind you of your failures, encourage you to quit now because you’re going to fail anyway and that will be the end of the world.  Yes, those monsters!

Most of us have no choice sometimes but to listen to those inner critics as they go on and on about our inadequacies. Maybe they sound a bit like your mother. Maybe they just sound like a very mean version of yourself.

At MonsterJournals.com, we call them monsters. And we teach useful ways to handle them. Ways that don’t involve covering your ears and yelling “shut up and leave me alone!” Or, alternatively, hopelessly sinking into the mire, weighed down by their cruel-but-true words.

The other way (yes, there is one).

In short, it’s this: listen to your monsters. But really listen, asking them questions about what they say, being curious about their motivation.

If you really listen to the monster voices, you’ll often find they are driven by fear. Fear of failure. Fear of rejection and ridicule. Fear of pain.

When someone tells you they’re afraid of something, you don’t say, “Oh, shut up, that’s stupid!  There’s nothing to be afraid of.”  Weeelll, you could say that, but it’s unlikely to make them any less afraid. They’ll just stop sharing their feelings with you. And go and be afraid somewhere else.

Of course, with monsters, the ones who live inside your mind, that doesn’t work. They can’t stop sharing their feelings with you, because the feelings are yours to begin with.

Why do we have monsters?

Some part of you is scared.

Some part of you is scared, and it’s yelling at another part of you, and making all parts of you miserable.

Rather than telling them all to just shut up (which perpetuates the yelling), or sliding into a slump (which perpetuates the misery), try listening.

Listening means taking a moment whenever your monsters show up; to meet with them. It means assuming they have something meaningful to say, something you ought to know. It means being curious about what they are afraid of, what they are trying to protect you from.

By interviewing your monsters, and giving them your full, curious attention, you can find out what they are afraid of and what they are ultimately after. And then you can try to work out ways you could work together, or find a compromise.

Once the listening starts, the yelling can stop. And everyone will feel better for it.

About the Author: Willie Hewes is an illustrator and monster whisperer. She and fellow monster expert Alexia Petrakos share their wisdom and pretty monster things at www.monsterjournals.com.  Visit them there, where you can also see a real live monster conversation in action!

We talk a lot hear about what outstanding listeners do and who they’re being.   Sometimes, we’re our own worst enemy when it comes to listening. Here are three traps we can fall into when it comes to listening effectively:

1. Let our stuff get in the way.  Whatever’s going on for you right now isn’t put on the backseat while you focus your full attention on the other person, you know, the one doing the talking. 

Usually this trap opens up when you’re unaware that you even have your own stuff, and you’re also unaware that your stuff isn’t you.  You aren’t able to put it aside, even for a portion of time.  It ends up cluttering up the listening space, tripping us all up – even those of us who can’t see it — we know it’s there.

2. Not giving away any ‘free’ non verbals.  You don’t let the person you’re with know they are being listened to by giving them clues.  Non-verbal clues are often best when they’re subtle and in the great listeners toolkit are these staples:  nodding, leaning forward, eyebrow raising, steady but not penetrating eye contact, “uh-uhn”s’.  Just to name a few of the regulars. 

When you’re cluttering up the listening space you either don’t give any of these clues or you use them in a formulaic way – you end up being a caricature of a good listener, rather than simply being a great listener.  

It’s true that too much nodding can make some people feel patronised.  Or seasick.  But when they’re done well – well, they make all the difference in the world.  These kinds of listening clues encourage, they allow, they open doors.  I worked with a man who was an outstanding listener – when you were with him, he would give you all this great non-verbal feedback that he was listening you – and you were fascinating!  He was one of my favourite people to talk to – I felt like the centre of the universe when I was speaking to him, like every word I uttered was gold.  I once observed him talking to someone else and his head was nodding so much I thought it might come loose from his neck.  Funny, I’d never noticed that when I was the one he was listening to.

When we’re cluttering up the listening space, we keep our listening clues to ourselves, leaving our listening compatriots wondering if we’re really there.  Or not.

Another version of the “non clue” school of listening is the administration of a strained and loaded silence.  On the surface it might seem like it’s creating space - space for listening to take place.  What this particular breed of silence really results in is an intimidated speaker who can’t wait for the silence to be over.  This is worse than cluttering up the listening space – it’s sabotaging it in a passive-aggressive way.

 3.  Talk all over the place.  It is physically impossible to listen and talk at the same time.  It simply cannot be done.  When we’re filling up the conversation space with our own words, there’s no room for listening to happen.

I have no problem with a verbal equivalent of a tennis match, where words are flying around in the air like crazy.  That can be fun and I have a few key friends that I particularly enjoy that kind of banter with.  But it doesn’t involve true listening.  True listening is not a contact sport.  There’s no winner, which means there’s no loser.  There’s no score. True listening is an act of generosity. 

Over the next week, tune in to how much you are cluttering up the listening space.  Are you getting in your own way when it comes to being a first rate listener?  And what can you do to get out of your way?