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| My mentor, Jon Young |
Last Saturday I flew back from Santa Cruz, CA, where I had spent a few days working with one of my mentors. Jon Young is an expert in mentoring and cultural repair. He is also a world-class naturalist and one of the best listeners I have ever met.
A week before my trip, I lead a workshop on deep listening. As I always do when I present on this topic, I started off by asking the group to share what they do when they are engaged in conversation and the other person is talking. Their answers were typical for a group of sincere committed professionals, and included such things as:
- Categorizing
- Planning
- Evaluating
- Relating
- Processing
- Remembering
- Strategizing
- Incorporating
Do these look familiar? What do you do
while you are engaged in conversation and another person is talking?
Is it similar?
One thing we can notice as we look over
this list is that everything on it is distinct from listening. And
yet these are exactly the things that most of us do in conversation,
most of the time. When another person is talking, we are usually
doing something other than listening. We are filtering.
When we try to process, relate,
categorize, or even just understand, we filter out everything that we
don't consider important. What passes through these filters is our
own version of what another person has said, rather than with what
the other person was out to communicate. We are left with an
experience of ourselves—of our thoughts, our ideas, and our
reactions. We also leave our conversation partner with an experience
of us and our thoughts, ideas and reactions. We could (generously)
call this partial listening or intermittent listening.
Jon Young developed his exceptional
listening skills by sitting still in the woods, listening to the
quietest sounds in nature. By focusing on the quietest sounds, Jon
learned to set his filters aside and just listen. As a result, when
you talk to Jon, he hears what is important to you rather than what
is important to him. You are left with an experience of yourself; an
experience of your own thoughts and ideas—perhaps ones you did not
even know you had. This is deep listening.
In a future blog post, we will explore
more about levels of listening, and how we can cultivate our own
capacity for deep listening.
Until then, I invite you to take a few
moments to sit back, relax, and listen to the quietest sounds in your
environment. What is it like to listen without any filtering?
