Someone said to me years ago, “You have two ears and one mouth. If you truly want to understand someone, use them in that proportion.” One of my favourite writers, Robert Greenleaf, summed up this idea in The Servant As Leader as follows:
It is the seekers who make the prophets. Why do we not hear and heed the prophetic voices that are in our very midst? There are voices of great clarity and with a quality of insight equal to that of any age, speaking cogently all the time. It is the level of interest and seeking, the responsiveness of the listeners, that enables a prophetic voice to grow in stature. The challenge is that we see current prophecy within the context of past wisdom, we tend to live in the past when it comes to wisdom, we have decided not to live in the present. So listen carefully to the prophetic voices that are speaking now.
An example of this principle in action was the leader of a large, important, and difficult to administer public institution. One day he realised things weren’t the way he had hoped they would be. His solution was unusual.
For three months he stopped reading newspapers, listening to the news broadcasts, watching TV; and for this entire period he relied wholly on those he met in the course of his work to tell him what was going on. In three months his administrative problems were resolved.
There were no miracles; but out of the sustained intentness of listening that was produced by this unusual decision, this able man learned and received the insights needed to set the right course. He and his team were strengthened by the process.
Why is active listening so rare today? One problem is that people are very quick to look for someone else to blame, to pin a problem on rather than admitting, “OK, I have a problem. What is it? What can I do about my problem?”
Do we listen to the one we want to communicate to?
As we approach confrontation, is our attitude one of wanting to understand?
The only true response to a problem should be to listen first. The spin off is that true listening builds strength in other people. Saint Francis said, “Grant that I may not seek so much to be understood as to understand.”
One way of learning to listen is to not be afraid of silence and of asking the question of oneself, “In saying what I have in mind, will I really improve on the silence?” which reminds me of something that Blaise Pascal said in 1652, when I was just a lad. “People’s misfortunes stem from one thing and one thing alone and that is their inability to sit in silence on their own.”
