Peacemaking in the Church and Beyond - Lesson 14

So, what are some barriers to good listening, to responsible listening? Why then, am I not a better listener if this stuff is so simple? Well, as I said, the first one is what we might call heightened emotions. When emotions are strongest, it's especially hard to achieve that frame of reference of another person. I've got all my stuff going on that I want to protect, and it's much more difficult, so it's important in these kind of conflict situations to lower the level of emotion with learning technique. I tell you, as I said the other day, it's kind of like learning to run the marathon. If you haven't trained beforehand, it's tough to just go out and run 26.2 miles. When you're in the midst of conflict, now, I need to learn how to listen, but it ain't going to happen; it's just not in the cards. So, practice this stuff in the shallow water before you get out into the deep water. 

The second one, which is very real in my life, is familiarity. What do I mean by that? The better I know someone, the more likely I am to make premature judgments about what they're going to say. The more history I have with another person, the more likely I am to predict or be out in front of them as to what they're going to say. This is probably the biggest issue that I face when I'm listening to my wife, whom I love more than anybody in the world, but this issue of familiarity is the issue that I have to shut down more often than anything else because, you know, maybe I am right 60% of the time of what she's going to say, but it's that other 40% that'll knock you out of the woods. It's just tough. 

So, it's that issue of hanging in the conversation long enough to really hear what the other person is saying, and the stakes go up when we're familiar with the other person. Strangers, I have no problem, those that I care to listen to, and this energy that we give to listening is selective because you can't listen to everybody with this kind of level of intensity. But where you want to establish trust, these principles are just critical. 

The third area is a fear of change. You know, if I listen to somebody without judgment, if I just kind of let it go, I feel sometimes and oftentimes like I'm going to lose control and I might end up being changed myself if I listen too well. I’ve learned, though, that my own experience is that people don't want me to agree with everything they say; otherwise there's not much of a relationship. But they do want me to know that I've heard what they've said, their total message. The issue is, again, not whether you've heard them, but whether you've proven to them that you've heard them. So, it's heightened emotions. It's fear of change. It's familiarity. 

The other is what Pete deLisser refers to as the 600-word gap. Are any of you familiar with the 600-word gap? It goes like this. The 600-word gap is that most of us can listen at a rate of about 750 words a minute. They've tested people listening to audio; you can listen and retain information at about that speed. The problem is that most of us speak at an average rate of 150 words a minute. The gap between those two is 600 words per minute. Now multiply that if a person is talking for 2 minutes at 1200. The question is, what are you and I doing with that extra time, with that gap, with the vacuum space, with our capacity to process. You know, I'm a Southerner, so I even speak slower than 150 words a minute. There are some people who speak faster, but it's close. 

So, the question is, right now, Rachel, what are you doing with that other 600 words? Trying to be present. Sam, what are you doing? Exactly. See, that's what's going on, isn't it? And so it's as natural as breathing, and the difficulty is that we've got all this stuff going on in our minds while the other person is talking. And here's the other trick to the 600-word gap -- and this is critical in conflict -- generally speaking, when we're listening to other people and when the emotions go up, all that kind of stuff, we tend to grab hold of the first thing they say and begin in our minds with this 600-word gap to formulate our response, whether it's a retort or a confrontation or whatever the case may be. It's kind of like being in a bullfight. You know, we want to do this and do that, and make sure that we're in the right space all the time. 

Here's the deal. Most people in a conflict situation, or in any situation when we're dealing with personal relationship-type stuff, they tend not to say what they really want to say at the beginning of the conversation. They tend to wait until the end of what they say, the end of their talk, to say what they really want to say. Now, have you experienced what I'm talking about here? When we respond to the first thing they've said, what does that do? It communicates that we really haven't heard them. It simply communicates that we've missed everything else, and you can hear that in language. ‘Yeah, but you didn't hear me; I went on to say this,’ and this kind of stuff, but if we'll hang in there until the end of what they say, and then use devises, techniques to repeat back the last thing that they've said, and I could take you through some exercises (there are some exercises here), then we begin to build that level of trust, because then we begin to prove to people that we've heard what they've said. Do you follow that? 

So, it's that last thing that they said; it's about shutting down the 600 words, and one of the ways that we shut it down is if we can concentrate long enough to pay attention to the last thing, a lot of that 600 words shuts down. We shut down that gap so that we really are listening, and I have done this exercise with so many people, but it's simply having someone stand and listen to the other person talk, and the discipline is I am required to do only one thing, and that is I can take this discussion any way I want after you're finished, but the only requirement is that I repeat something from the last phrase that you've stated before I go on, and you cannot imagine how that simply changes the whole discussion. And that doesn't mean that you can't share your own ideas. It doesn't mean that you can't be directive in what you say or any of that, but it simply means that if you'll hang in there long enough to hear the last thing rather than the first thing, then this gap begins to shut down, and it creates the kind of trust that's so important in conflict situations. 

We have some communication exercises, and those of you that are on online will want to work through these. I think you'll find these helpful as practical tools. It starts out with ways that we tend to interrupt people or people interrupt us, and then we turn and look at ourselves. There are a number of different exercises there that I think you'll find helpful to work through. If we had a week, we could work on this communication thing a lot more, but here are some objectives as we talk about the specifics in responsible listening. 

One is to clarify generalities. People will talk in general terms like ‘we tried that before.’ That's a generality, isn't it? It's important to clarify those generalities in every case; don't take those generalities for granted. Critical issue; it's important to get those on the table, even if they seem to be obvious to you. Sometimes we can make critical errors if we take those for granted. 

Secondly, clarify stated and unstated emotion. Sometimes somebody will say, ‘you know, I'm really mad at you,’ and that's pretty clear. You can say, ‘I perceive you're mad at me.’ You know, I get that. So, it's easier when somebody actually communicates the emotion, but if somebody says, ‘you always leave that door open,’ well, that's not a stated emotion, is it? But there are a number of ways that you could interpret that emotion, and so it's helpful to clarify what they're feeling; ‘I sense that you're frustrated with me’ or with these people, or whatever the case may be, you know, and the comeback may be, ‘no, I'm not frustrated; I'm just, you know, impatient,’ or whatever it is. So, at least there's an ownership on their part and there's a clarification on yours. It's really dangerous to assume a certain emotion when that's actually not the emotion someone is feeling when you're in conflict. It's okay to identify it. A lot of us as Christians, we're afraid to identify those emotions because we're afraid that they're going to somehow reach out and bite us. But the reality is, it's hard to get real work done unless we have identified what that emotion is so we can begin to unpack it, like, tell me about that; what is going on? And so we really seek that clarification, and really, that can unpack it for us. 

So, that's the whole area of responsible listening, and again, I could encourage you to pick up Peter deLisser’s book. It's called Be Your Own Executive Coach, and it has a lot of these principles within it, not altogether presented the way they’ve been presented here, but it's a helpful piece of work. It's an earthy piece of work. It's written for business leaders, but I think you'll find it very, very helpful because it's written in a very engaging style.