Navigating a Whackadoodle World: Episode 69, The Power of Communication and Understanding, or All God given talents need practice.
A Whackadoodle chat about why people have such a hard time listening and why it matters, along with The Sound of Silence...
We’d finished our tutoring session early. Her ride had called to say he’d be late, and I’d had a sudden hankering for ice cream. Solution? “I’m walking up to the little store. Wanna come?”
She did, so we walked up the small hill, across the raised sidewalk, and into the little store I had known since childhood.
“Lord,” I complained a short while later, pulling an orange creamsicle from the ancient freezer case. “I can remember when one of these cost tens cents.”
From behind came my students voice, muffled by a large bite of Dave bar. “That just proves that you’re getting old.”
My instant thought was, “I’m not just getting old, I am old,’ but I forced my lips to say, “Not old so much as well traveled.”
“That’s right,” she snickered, licking a piece of fallen chocolate from her hand. “You’ve traveled around the sun…what…sixty-two times?”
“Sixty-three,” I corrected. “And worth every mile.”
We walked home to the sound of rustling paper and munching ice cream. It was a beautiful sunny day. The kind of day that comes after a major storm, when all the air smells clean. In the distance, I could hear the rhythmic pounding of kids practicing basket ball on the street. Their voices occasionally calling out to each other. In upspoken agreement, we’d passed my house and begun the short trek down to the bay access, when I found myself starting to hum one of my favorite songs.
After a few bars, she caught the tune and joined in with the words, “People talking without speaking; People hearing without listening; People writing songs that voices never shared. No one dared disturb the sound of silence…” She paused for the break, and I joined her for the final verse; my voice full of mock severity, “Fools,’ said I, ‘You do not know; silence like a cancer grows; hear my words that I might teach you; take my arms that I might reach you. But my words like silent raindrops fell, and echoed in the wells of silence.”
My smile broadened after our impromptu concert. “I didn’t know you knew that song,” I offered.
“My Mom’s got a lot of Simon and Garfunkel records in her antique collection,” she told me. “She played it all the time when I was growing up.”
“I wouldn’t call Simon and Garfunkel antique,” I protested. She merely grunted her response, so I added. “Do you like the song?”
“Yeah, it’s kind of sad, but I like it. It makes me wonder why people are like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like talking without speaking, listening without hearing. Most people do that don’t they? Listen without hearing. It’s like they’re too busy in their own mind to listen to anyone else’s.”
“I suppose that’s true.” We’d turned off the road and were headed down the small dirt path which led up to the sea wall. The tide was high and lapping over the edge. There would be no sitting on the edge and dangling our feet today.
She got as close as she dared to the overflowing water and crouched down, staring out at the horizon. “So why do you think people are so bad at listening?” she asked at last.
“Probably for the same reason they don’t understand their government or bother to vote.”
“And that is?”
“A life full of bad examples,” I sighed. “Bad examples and nobody to teach them any better. I mean when was the last time you studied listening?”
“You teach me about listening all the time,” she retorted.
“Yeah, but what about your friends? What about your parents and their friends? When was the last time you saw Listening 101 as a diploma requirement? If you think about it, we spend years teaching reading, writing, science, arithmetic, all the ‘essentials,’ but never once do we think about making effective listening a school requirement. We just assume that hearing is the same as listening, so why bother to teach people how to do it.” I reached down to pluck a stone from the pebbled ground and tossed it into the bay as hard as I could. It landed near a wavelet with barely a ripple of its own.
“But where do they get it wrong?” she insisted.
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I do know that too often we’re selective in our listening. We hear what we expect to hear, and we forget to notice the nuances, the complexity if you will, of what it actually takes to communicate. Too often, we just assume that we already know what somebody is going to say. Or we get so busy with our own thoughts that we fail to really take in other people’s thoughts.”
“Hum,” she considered my words. “I think we might need a radical shift in how we think about listening.”
“How so?”
“Well, listening is like a gift we give, isn’t it?” I kept silent until she went on, “Plus it’s like the best kind of gift because it gives something to both the listener and the listened to. You know what I mean?”
“I think I do,” I nodded, squatting down beside her. “For the people listened to, it would provide emotional air, a breathing space, an affirmation. For the people listening, it would provide a greater understanding, stronger relationships, more accurate context.”
“So where do people go wrong?” she insisted, this time with a sense of urgency.
“I think that people assume listening is easy, when really listening is hard. It takes work. It takes technique. And it takes lots of practice.”
“And it takes knowing how,” she concluded. “That’s the problem. People don’t always know how to listen. It’s like you said before, bad examples. They never get listened to, so they never learn what it takes to really listen.”
“Loads of books have been written on the subject,” I offered.
She turned a twinkling eye towards me, “Including yours?”
“Yes, including mine,” I slapped her playfully on the shoulder. “I just don’t think that some people are even aware when they are bad at listening. It’s one of those catch-22’s where you need to know how to listen in order to notice if you’re bad at listening.”
She laughed suddenly, “That reminds me of this friend of mine. She never lets anyone finish a story because she’s always jumping in with a story of her own before they can reach their punchline. I don’t think she’s even aware that’s she’s interrupting.”
I laughed along with her, “I once had a student who was so bad at reading body language that he would start conversations with people who were reading, or follow people out of the room in order to get his point across.” I shook my head sadly at the memory. “I know that he wasn’t aware of what he was doing.”
“And of course, we never try to correct their behavior because it would be too impolite. That being the case,” she added grimly, “It’s safe to assume that nobody is pointing out how bad we are at it, so we all need more practice in listening.”
“Trust me, even experts who write books on the subject need to keep practicing. It’s the same for any God given talent. Whether you’re an Olympic athletes, an opera star, or a concert pianist, only a fool expects to stay at the top of their game without practice.”
“Funny, you comparing listening skills to being a concert pianist.”
“Not so funny,” I countered. “Jane Austin makes that very comparison in Pride and Prejudice when Darcy explains that he just doesn’t have the talent of conversing easily with those he’s never seen; and Elizabeth replies that although she does not have the talent at the piano that others posses, she’s always considered it to be her fault because she would not take the trouble to practice.”
“Hah,” she poked at the water. “You come up with the weirdest things.”
“I will, of course, take that as a complement.”
“Oh, it is,” she assured me. “Weird is always better than boring.” She sat silently, pondering the water, until eventually asking. “So would you say that Guidepost twelve is simply a reminder to keep practicing all the steps it take to listen and communicate effectively?”
“I suppose I might say that,” I agreed. I couldn’t help but add, “Do you remember all the steps?”
“I think so,” her face crinkled has she continued. “You have to start by listening to what’s not said. Stuff like body language and tone, to see if people are even open to a conversation, or if their emotions are influencing how their speaking. Then you have to be sure that people are using common definitions, so they don’t end up confused or arguing over semantics, and finally you need to check in to be sure that you understood correctly before you react.”
“Don’t forget to reflect on the context,” I reminded her. “How people’s beliefs, paradigms, or bias might be impacting the conversation. Some beliefs are easier to listen to than others. You need to listen to your own reactions, so you know whether you’re open to the conversation or not.”
“I think that’s the part that I need to practice,” she concluded with a frown. “I need to get better at listening to things I don’t always want to hear.”
“We can all use some work on that,” I agreed ruefully. “It’s easy to listen to people we agree with, and it’s hard to listen when we disagree. Our impulse is to either argue, or disregard. But understanding is the most critical step in persuasion, and understanding is impossible without listening.”
“It’s just so hard to take people seriously when they start talking nonsense.”
“Nonsense to you, not nonsense to them. It’s at those times that you listen for the beliefs behind the words. You aren’t trying to agree, or judge, or respond, you’re just trying to understand someone’s perspective.”
“Yeah, and sometimes you just wish they’d shut up.”
“There’s that, and it’s a perfectly valid choice to ignore what some people have to say because their ‘nonsense’ is just not worth your time or energy. Just make sure it is a choice and not a habit.” I glanced down at my watch and stood up, knees cracking. I arched my back to work out a kink, “We should probably head back, or your ride will be waiting.”
She stood up with a sigh, “It’s so nice near the water. We should have told him to pick me up here.”
”But we didn’t know that we’d be here at the time, did we?” I reminded her. With nothing more to add, we head back up the lane and arrived just in time to see him pull up. I gave her a hug and headed inside. At some point along the way, “The Sound of Silence” began to play once again in my head.
Have you ever noticed how both music and poetry have a way of making hard ideas more memorable and palatable? I suppose that’s a part of their magic.