Readings
Contribution Training: Levels of Listening
* Listening is a fundamental human activity. The internal process is also mysterious. We rarely know how other people listen and do not get feedback from other people very often on our listening.
* In this work we say that you need 3 things to do this work of listening well: your eyes, your ears and a heart for human suffering. You need these things before you need theories and techniques.
* Listening is very complex. We break this into 7 Levels to try to reduce the complexity and to make improving our listening practical as a day- to-day activity. With the 7 Levels you can practice daily like a sport, a musical instrument or a language. Levels aren’t to be construed as a hierarchy of value. They are used for clarification of function and concept.
1. Passive Listening (PL): This relates most closely to Zen or Taoism and is completely non-interpretative. In this form of Listening, we try to take in what is being said without censoring or arguing with any of it. Whenever we feel defensive or feel a need to respond, the task is to just breathe and let the objection go. In listening in this way we are not agreeing with anything we hear, and we have no responsibility for what has been said. We are merely the receiver of the information. It is a most powerful Contribution Training (CT) tool for many of us. Passive Listening will change your life. It will, if practiced with discipline, assuredly improve both your memory and intuition. The CT 7 Levels of Listening are memory and intuition training. Also the way as practitioners we listen to "no" from a client and create important integrity as well avoid power struggles.
2. Content: The basic stuff of therapy etc. This is the root of Rogers’ “Active Listening” which is the general model of listening taught to counselors (“I hear you saying…”). This style of listening to a person is basic to many schools of therapy. Listening this way is still non-judgmental and is used to underline in our memory the important things said by the person we are listening to. We listen to the actual words, and their meaning to the speaker as the speaker identifies them.
3. The Obvious: This may be the hardest one to grasp. This is the literal sensory data we are receiving as we listen to a person. From a Gestalt perspective we are listening to what is obvious in the overall pattern of what the person says using both content and the feeling expressed. We are also attending to what isn’t there. What is being avoided, or in art terms, what is in the “negative” space? We are still being non-judgmental. The most import thing is to perceive the person, their words and voice as a whole, and not rush ahead to our opinion. Combined with PL this can provide extraordinary accuracy.
4, Voice: Listening to the quality of the voice comes into CT practice from improvisational theatre work and Viola Spolin. The tone, timbre, color, pacing, energy, etc. of a person’s voice can tell us a great deal if we keep our listening closer to the “Obvious” and avoid moving quickly to “Evaluation”. Do not be too quick to interpret the voice but notice where the voice itself gives us a message.
5. Emotional Reaction: We will have an emotional reaction to what we hear when we listen. This reaction can be very useful but it also can lead to error especially when it connects to our personal memories or old experiences with this person or someone like her/him. The emotional reaction may signal something about the intent of the person we are listening to. It will cause a swing of our Emotional Pendulum (our emotional movement mechanism-to be explored in Week 4) in us in some ways. We need to clarify our feelings (another aspect that derives from Carl Rogers’ Active Listening, and Role Clarification theory)
6. Goodwill: In this level we are listening for a quality of “goodwill” (defined here a someone’s willingness and ability to consider the possibility of change). We know that the words “I’m sorry” are not always sincere, for instance. It can also be true that frank feedback about something we are doing, though it feels unwelcome, may be something that helps us to achieve change. We are listening at this level for the quality of sincerity around change and combining it with our understanding of the person’s ability to actually deliver on what they are saying. When we utilize this along with Passive Listening it can create real accuracy.
7. Evaluation: From Freud, etc. Psychology has a major role in assessing and evaluating an individual and what she/he is saying. This is the type of listening employed to render diagnoses. It involves rational thought about the person, their history and circumstances, what they are capable of and why. We all listen at this level. Emotional reactions can make this hard to do with accuracy, as we as human beings are not objective.
Checking your Listening
Accuracy and safety can come from being able to move back UP THE LEVELS OF LISTENING. When I find myself becoming reactive in the Emotional level, I can start noticing the quality of Voice, or the Content to see what the trigger for my reaction might have been. When I get lost, I can back up to the Passive Listening level and see if I can just let the words and message come through without reaction or evaluation. We will be practicing all of these levels over the next several classes. Most of the time in general conversations we are listening on several levels at once. The attempt to isolate aspects of listening is intended to build skill and confidence.