Listening
We often talk, at least in my trade, about the importance of listening. Listening is a specific skill which can be learned and trained into. Listening well requires not just the nodding and reflecting words back type of hearing, but allowing the other person or people to think, develop their thoughts, have space to think without interruption. Nancy Kline, who wrote ‘Time to Think’ (a book I very much recommend, if you haven’t come across it), is strong on allowing space to think when we listen to people, suggesting that often people have the answers to questions they might come to us with, and our listening is important to allow others space to come to their own conclusions.
I am not great at remembering not to interrupt when I am in conversations and meetings, but this is part of learning humility as well as listening, indeed, the two are closely tied together. One cannot embrace truly listening to someone with respect and valuing their thoughts and words, without understanding that they and their thoughts are, at the very least, of equal value to our own.
That doesn’t mean agreeing with them, indeed, sometimes people need to be challenged in their views, but it means being open to change our views, opinions, and perceptions. Whatever views and ideas we have which are deeply seated, they should and could always be open to being both challenged and changed, and we can become stale in our thinking if we are not open to new ideas.
There are a few mixed up ideas about listening in my writing, because I’m still at the stage of thinking this through myself, but I am thinking that there are different contexts in which we listen.
When I listen as a social worker, to someone who needs social work support, I listen professionally. It is important that I can both encourage but not interrupt. I need to allow stories and lives to be told, without trying to draw comparisons or place myself into the frame. Sometimes, it can be useful to have tools in one’s professional kit to encourage talking and that might be a reflection on my part, it might be a reassurance, but it is always centring the words and communication style of the person I am talking to.
When I listen to colleagues and managers at work, or settings where there is more of a peer aspect, again, it is about giving people space to think though what they are trying to say, being mindful of not interrupting and being open to changing my views, perceptions, and contexts. I attended a work event last week to remember the 75th anniversary of the docking of the Empire Windrush in Tilbury Docks. There was a short video which people talked about their experiences and people in the room, my colleagues from across the organisation shared thoughts and reflections about the experiences of being second generation immigrants from the Caribbean. I learnt from listening. I had heard some of the stories through conversations previously in my life, but every single experience is unique and can teach me about how we interact with difference and why we need to understand both the different experiences we have but also the commonality of experiences as humans.
The other kinds of listening can happen outside work, and it is not just about listening to spoken words and conversations in passing and with friends, it’s about ‘listening’ to the written word, the television, the radio, and being open to having our opinions and views changed by more knowledge, more compounding of wisdom, hearing different experiences. There may not be a distinction at all between these different spaces as some of my most significant learning has come from conversations, I’ve had with people I’ve worked with as a social worker, but it’s about understanding there is a different role that power, respect, and humility places in these different environments although of course, there is a place for all in every situation.
I have a lot more thinking about listening that I need to do and will expand on some of these ideas over the week as I head to a new day wondering what I can learn from the experiences and writings of others.
