Listening Now Blog

Group 61 was founded by John and Margaret Fox in Brisbane, Australia, with the purpose of building friendships with people with mental illnesses.  The people living with these illnesses are living alone and experiencing a degree of isolation that would be harmful to someone in complete mental health, let alone someone living with schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, OCD, dementia, or post traumatic stress disorder.  

In a recent Q Weekend magazine article, Trent Dalton talks of meeting John Fox and the client he ends up spending time with, a young man called Justin.  In Trent’s interview with John, John gives a list of directives including “don’t lend him money or cigarettes”.  All very interesting, but the hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I read these words:  “Don’t give any advice…. they are the people who can solve their problems best.  Your job is to listen.  You’re there to listen to them and not talk about your own problems and your own story.  The secret is time.  Unhurried time”.

We live in a world where giving advice in the course of a conversation is run of the mill, expected even.  To listen quietly, giving full unhurried attention to someone  — with no advice —  is unusual.  It is a rare person capable of sustaining that degree of listening.  It can even scare some people  to be listened to in that way.   If giving advice is standard operating procedure when conversing with “regular” people, then surely that applies double when talking with people living with mental illnesses, right?  If anyone needs advice, it’d be those folks with special needs, surely?  Seems that is not so.

What caught my attention with the Q Weekend piece about Group 61 was how the need to be listened to, with the underlying assumption being that the person being listened to is best placed to solve their own problems, applies to all of us.   

Over the next week or so, pay attention to how you are listening.  Do you find yourself crafting advice in your head, ready to deliver as soon as (or even before) the other person stops talking?  If you are ready to explore with the idea that you are the person best placed to solve your own problems, download the I’m Listening Now program.  You might also be interested in our four-part e-class on what outstanding communicators do. 

However you do it, start listening more to the wisdom within.  When you do this, you honourthe still, quiet voice inside you.