Listening is a crucial skill. You’ve heard that so often that it has become a platitude. I’m sad about that because… well… because listening is a crucial skill.

Crucial for what? If you want to unstick a stuck conversation, you will need to listen well enough to understand what the other person is saying. If you want to respond to resistance, or to resolve a conflict that involves a significant emotional component — and nearly all conflicts do — you will need to listen for the other person’s motivations. If you want to maintain or strengthen or repair a relationship, you will need to listen for the other person’s feelings and needs.

Okay, listening is crucial. That’s still a platitude unless we put some details behind it. If listening is so important, what are some practical steps we can take to improve? I’ve found a number of tests that help me sharpen my listening.

In any situation in which listening is especially important, my first goal is to make sure I am prepared to listen. To test how well I am prepared to listen, I ask myself, “To what extent am I willing to be changed?” If I enter a conversation intent on persuading the other person to my point of view, unwilling to change my own point of view, I limit my ability to listen.

This is just a test, not an admonition. I’m not recommending that you go into each conversation prepared to abandon your most cherished beliefs and values. Into each conversation you bring a suite of plans, intentions, conclusions, interpretations, judgments, beliefs, and values. You may be willing to change some of these things, and inflexible about others. The key is not to put all of these up for negotiation, but to be mindful of what you’re holding onto, and mindful that inflexibility may limit your ability to hear what other people are saying. Are the things you’re holding onto more important than listening fully? That depends on the specifics of the situation. My way of sorting out the specifics is to notice what I’m holding onto and to remind myself of my choices. I ask myself, “What am I holding tightly to in this conversation? Is this more important to me than listening with empathy to what others are saying?” If so, fine. If not, I’ll want to relax my grip so that I can listen.

The first test is about being prepared to listen. The next test tells me whether I am understanding what another person is saying. To test for understanding, I say what meaning I’m making of the other person’s words, then ask “Is that what you mean?” If the person replies, “Yes, that’s what I mean,” I’ve understood. If not, I haven’t.

In most cases, if I didn’t understand well the other person will point out the parts I misunderstood or rephrase them in some way. Every now and again I have to prompt for clarification by asking, “What parts did I misunderstand?” After the person clarifies, I can test again for whether I understand.

This is a test of understanding, not of agreement. I may understand perfectly well, to the other person’s satisfaction, and still disagree.

The second test tells me whether I have heard a piece of what another person is saying. Now I want to know whether I’ve understood all of what the person wants to say. To test whether I have listened fully, I ask, “Is there more that you want to say?”

Sometimes the person has more to say, and says it. I use the “test for understanding” to make sure I’ve understood the new information and how it fits with what the person said earlier. Then I ask again, “Is there more?” When the person says, “No, there’s no more I want to say,” I’ve listened fully.

The second and third tests tell me whether I’ve fully understood the person’s meaning. Sometimes I want to go further, to empathize to make sure I’ve understood the feelings and needs behind what the person is saying. To test my empathy, I ask, “Are you feeling            because you are needing           ?” And I fill in the blanks with whatever feelings and needs I think the person is experiencing.

How do I know what the other person is feeling and needing? Sometimes the person expresses feelings directly: “I’m angry” or “I’m disappointed” or “I’m really looking forward to this.” Sometimes the need is clearly expressed: “I’m worried about losing my job.”

Sometimes the signs are less direct — shouting, a crack in the voice, changes in gestures, body position, facial expressions, or skin tone. I never know for sure what these mean. Sometimes, especially when I notice a sudden change in one of these signals, I ask, “What’s going on for you? What just happened?” Other times, I take the advice that Kelly Bryson offers in his book
Don’t Be Nice, Be Real
: guess! As Bryson says:

You do not have to guess right. Just guess human. Just imagine a human feeling and need that might be behind their words. Guessing feelings and needs at least puts us in the camp of humanness, instead of judgment.

The best way I know to build skill in understanding other people’s feelings and needs is to learn more about my own. As I learn to distinguish my feelings and needs more accurately, and to empathize with them, I am better able to imagine what others may be feeling and needing. The Center for Nonviolent Communication web site includes helpful lists of human feelings and needs.

Whew! That’s a lot of work! Is all of this squishy, touchy-feelie stuff necessary? Sometimes no. Sometimes yes. Empathy is important whenever the conversation involves strong feelings that may interfere with communication. And empathy is important whenever I want to maintain, strengthen, or repair a relationship. That is, whenever I care about the person and our relationship, and I want to show that I care.

References: I learned the “willing to be changed” test from Amy Schwab, who learned it from David Schmaltz, who learned it from Sharon Bennett. The “test for understanding” and “test for listening fully” come from Harville Hendrix’s audio book
Keeping the Love You Find
. Though much of this book is specific to love relationships, Hendrix’s techniques and exercises about listening apply equally well to other kinds of relationships. The “test for empathy” comes from Marshall Rosenberg’s
Nonviolent Communication
and Kelly Bryson’s
Don’t Be Nice, Be Real
.

Laurent Bossavit’s recent blog entry about stability got me thinking, as his incipient thoughts always do.

What makes stability an issue? Under what conditions would we pay any attention at all to stability? When we care about something that may be threatened by a force acting on it. If we care about a thing, and there are no forces acting to change it, we don’t need to worry about stability. And there’s little point maintaining the stability of something we don’t care about. Stability is an issue only when we care about something that is threatened.

How can we maintain stability? I can think of three general strategies: adapt, isolate, and absorb.

The first strategy is to
adapt the thing you want to stabilize, to modify it so that it now benefits from the forces that previously threatened it. For example, when the United States experienced oil crises in 1973 and 1979, U. S. automobile manufacturers began making smaller, lighter cars with more fuel efficient engines. And when Japanese companies began to export inexpensive, high quality cars to the United States, U. S. manufacturers began to sell foreign-made automobiles under American companies’ brand names.

The second strategy is to
isolate the thing, to separate it from the forces that threaten it. For example, the paint on your car separates the metal from the wind, rain, and salt that can corrode it.

The third strategy is to
absorb the threatening forces, to convert them into a form that is either less harmful or more useful. Then either incorporate the new form or dissipate it. Absorbing is a combination of adapting and isolating. You adapt to the environment so as to better convert or direct the threatening force. And you direct or convert the force so as to separate it from the thing you are trying to stabilize. For example, the shock absorbers and the tires on your car absorb mechanical motion. They convert mechanical motion into heat, a more readily disposable form, then dissipate the heat. For another example, your automobile insurance converts sudden, large expenses that could threaten your financial stability into smaller, more predictable expenses.

Note that each strategy for maintaining stability requires change. In order to keep the important thing stable, we must be willing to change something else, something that is less important. When you buy automobile insurance, you give up something less important, your available funds, in order to maintain something more important, your overall financial stability.

Here’s a question that now intrigues me: How do we decide which strategy or combination of strategies to employ to keep some precious thing stable? Do we adapt to changes when we can, and isolate ourselves only from forces to which we cannot adapt? Or are there some forces that we will try first to isolate ourselves from, and adapt only if isolation fails? What about the nature or value of the thing we’re trying to keep stable? How does that influence our choice of strategy?

One more question: Are there other common strategies for maintaining stability that are not accounted for by adapting, isolating. or absorbing?

If you look at my list of favorite books of 2003, you’ll notice that over the past year I’ve been a student of conversation and relationships. I’ve been especially interested in how we can make our conversations more rewarding for ourselves, for others, and for our relationships.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High

by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler helped me to make a big leap in that direction, and that’s why it is my favorite book of 2003.

A few years ago my friend Kay Pentecost, knowing of my deep interest in communication and relationships, recommended Crucial Conversations very highly. I bought the book a few months later, and finally read it in September, 2003. Of the ton of helpful ideas in Crucial Conversations, I found four most helpful: starting with heart, filling the pool of shared meaning, safety, and stories.

Starting with heart means clarifying your purpose in the conversation. Before starting the conversation, ask yourself, What do I really want for myself? What do I really want for others? What do I really want for the relationship? If a conversation becomes difficult, return to your purpose by asking the questions again, and by asking, How would I behave if I really wanted these results?

Filling the pool of shared meaning. The authors define dialogue as the free flow of meaning between two or more people. We each enter a conversation with a personal “pool of meaning”, the combination of our opinions, feelings, theories, and experiences about the topic. “People who are skilled at dialogue,” the authors say, “do their best to make it safe for everyone to add their meaning to the shared pool.”

Safety. What makes safety important? “At the core of every successful conversation lies the free flow of relevant information.” When people feel unsafe in conversation, that flow is blocked. “As people begin to feel unsafe, they start to move down one of two unhealthy paths. They move either to silence (withholding meaning from the pool) or to violence (trying to force meaning in the pool).”

Crucial Conversations offers many ways to test and maintain safety. One key idea is that if we want to maintain safety, we must attend to two “safety conditions.” The first is mutual purpose. We can maintain mutual purpose partly by “starting with heart.” The second safety condition is mutual respect. “In essence, feelings of disrespect often come when we dwell on how others are different from ourselves. We can counteract these feelings by looking for ways we are similar.” The authors say that in many cases, “If you simply realize that your challenge is to make it safer, nine out of ten times you’ll intuitively do something that helps.”

Stories. Like several other books I read in 2003, Crucial Conversations emphasizes the importance of stories in our communications and relationships. “Just after we observe what others do and just before we feel some emotion about it, we tell ourselves a story. That is, we add meaning to the action we observed. To the simple behavior we add motive. Why were they doing that? We also add judgment—is that good or bad?”

This sequence is very similar to Virginia Satir’s Ingredients of an Interaction, the model of communication that I describe in my article “Untangling Communication.” I like the author’s use of the word story here, because it gives me a richer, more dynamic way to talk about how we make meaning.

My review has only scratched the surface. I highly recommend Crucial Conversations.
And Kay, thank you so much for recommending this book so strongly.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High
by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler.

As you can see from the list of books below, over the past year I’ve been a student of conversation and relationships. I’ve been especially interested in how we can make our conversations more rewarding for ourselves, for others, and for our relationships. Crucial Conversations helped me to make a big leap in that direction, and that’s why it is my favorite book of 2003. [Full Review]

Other favorites:

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen.

Difficult Conversations shows that any conversation that matters is really three conversations: one about what happened, another about how we feel about what happened, and a third about how all of that affects the way we think of ourselves. When we try to talk about all of these important things at once, each conversation confuses the other, and we derail the overall conversation.

The second half of the book describes how to conduct a learning conversation, a conversation in which we learn the other person’s story, express our views and feelings fully, and solve problems together. These ideas are very similar to the concepts in Crucial Conversations of dialogue and the “shared pool of meaning,” and also to the approach I describe in my articles “Resistance as a Resource” and “Untangling Communication.”

Difficult Conversations and Crucial Conversations complement each other nicely. The books cover similar content, and express compatible ideas about how to make challenging conversations work.

Don’t Be Nice, Be Real: Balancing Passion for Self with Compassion for Others
by Kelly Bryson.

How to move beyond understanding each other to empathizing with each other. Expands on Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (below). [Full Review]

The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook & Companion: A Guide to Understanding Your Expertise
by Peter Block.

Peter Block and colleagues describe lessons they’ve learned from their experience of practicing the principles of Block’s
Flawless Consulting
.

Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, Revised edition
by Margaret J. Wheatley.

Wheatley applies principles from the “new sciences” of chaos, complexity, and self-organizing systems to leadership and human organizations.

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
by Dava Sobel.

The story of how clock maker John Harrison solved the problem of longitude. The difficulty Harrison experienced in gaining acceptance for his solution, despite the gravity of the problem, makes this a fascinating case study of resistance.

The Illustrated Longitude
, by Dava Sobel and William J. H. Andrews, has the same text as Sobel’s original book, with the addition of 180 marvelous photographs and illustrations, each described in detail.

Loving What Is: Four Questions that Can Change Your Life
by Byron Katie.

Katie describes “The Work,” a set of good questions by which we can identify and inquire into beliefs that cause stress and interfere with our communications, relationships, and happiness. Includes transcripts of many sessions in which Katie facilitates many people to inquire into their beliefs to resolve a wide variety of painful situations.

A CD version of Loving What Is includes live recordings of people doing “The Work.”

Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities
by Jill Freedman and Gene Combs.

Narrative therapy invites people to make visible the stories that create and sustain the problems with which they are struggling, and to create alternative stories that better support meaningful and fulfilling lives.

It was from this book that I began to understand the importance of stories and the influence that stories wield in our interactions and relationships. Also enlightening for me was the chapter about helpful questions.

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, 2nd Edition
by Marshall B. Rosenberg.

How to move from moralistic judgments — judgments that imply wrongness or badness on the part of people who don’t act in harmony with our values — to clearer, more effective ways to express our needs.

Rosenberg’s
Speaking Peace
is an audio version of these ideas.

Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide, Second Edition
by Harrison Owen.

Open Space Technology, a simple and powerful way to organize meetings and conferences, encourages passion, commitment, and personal responsibility, and taps the capacity of a group of passionate, committed, responsible people to self-organize to address complex issues.

See my earlier article about Open Space Technology and Owen’s book.

Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future
by Margaret J. Wheatley.

Wheatley encourages us to hold conversations about what matters most to us. Nothing fancy; just simple conversation. Simple and powerful. [Full Review]