Listening to Understand Rather Than to be Heard
What if we were to give each other the grace of time to be thoughtful in conversations? If we modeled the behavior ourselves and stayed engaged in our body language especially when our conversation partners are formulating their response, and then thanked them for being so thoughtful. If we could do this, how much more meaningful could our interactions become and how many hurt feelings and misunderstandings could we avoid?
Silence is a pretty awkward thing ordinarily, isn’t it? When we go for our morning jog we put on headphones. When we’re having conversations with groups or even when we are having a somewhat intimate conversation with a friend, generally we try to fill pauses that become too long.
Why is that? There’s no rule saying that if a conversation has a gap of a certain number of seconds we need to fill it with something or else relationships will be irreparably damaged. In fact, we logically know that giving a moment’s pause after someone has said something rather than immediately jumping into a response could lead to the other person feeling even more heard and valued. In most cases, the people I interact with are very kind and thoughtful people. So when I have conversations with them I get very little indication that they are just biting their tongue while I speak long enough for them to share what they have been impatiently wanting to say. Rather, it feels like they aren’t given the grace to pause for a few seconds to process what has been said before responding.
By now I’m sure we’ve all experienced how extra awkward silence can be in a virtual setting. I’ve facilitated a lot of zoom meetings over the last several years and it takes about every ounce of will power I have to stop myself from answering my own questions when I pose them to a group if answers don’t come in a few seconds. But when I’m able to hold back and hold participant accountable to be present and active in the dialogue, some of the greatest discussion happen. It often feels like the first awkward pause that the participant are kind of testing me to see if I’ll let them off the hook and allow them to just coast through the meeting. So what we were to change that perspective a bit.
One of our species’ super powers is the ability to communicate very complex ideas verbally so as to allow cooperation. But effective communication takes time and commitment on both the part of the listener and the speaker. I remember being selected to an activity where a couple dozen people were given a bag of random shaped pieces of paper, and my task was to describe how those couple dozen people should organize those shapes using only verbal instructions. Let me tell you, it was much more difficult than you’d think. Something that seemed perfectly clear to me resulted in every individual ended up with very different designs of those shapes.
I might have a slightly different look at this because I’ve had to relearn how to talk twice on top of when I was learning initially as a child. I’ve found decent ways of navigating language and generally I’m able to articulate my thoughts reasonably well, but that doesn’t change the fact that when I’m searching for the right word to describe a feeling or thought, it reminds me of standing on a ridge with jumbled words racing around me like a fast-moving cloud above my head and I have to jump at words as they come whistling by. I’m so used to it by now that I think most people probably don’t notice my challenges. But because language doesn’t come terribly easily to me it makes the prospect of having people I interact with give space for thoughtful pauses extra appealing.
What if we were to give each other the grace of time to be thoughtful in conversations? Perhaps the best way we could encourage this would be to model the behavior ourselves and stay engaged in our body language especially when our conversation partners are formulating their response. And then we could thank them for being so thoughtful and taking the time it takes to mull over what has been said. And if we could do this, how much more meaningful could our interactions become and how many hurt feelings and misunderstandings could we avoid?