the speech-thought differential
She says it’s like a game of catch with a lump of clay. Each person catches it and molds it with their perceptions before tossing it back. Things like education, race, gender, age, relationship with the other person, frame of mind, connotations of words, and distractions all influence how the clay is shaped.
People who have conversational sensitivity not only pay attention to spoken words, they also have a knack for picking up hidden meanings and nuances in tone
You can’t be good at detecting intricate cues in conversation if you haven’t listened to a lot of people
measurable proof of the transmission of thoughts, feelings, and memories.
You don’t need to act like you are paying attention if you are, in fact, paying attention.
Rogers described himself while active listening this way: “I hear the words, the thoughts, the feeling tones, the personal meaning, even the meaning that is below the conscious intent of the speaker
Eric Betzig.
“I’ve been lucky to be able to maintain that kid-like curiosity and enthusiasm for experimenting and learning,”
saying. He said listening well is a matter of continually asking yourself if people’s messages are valid and what their motivations are for telling you whatever they are telling you
But the shift response Crowe and McDowell described occurs when people, uncomfortable with others’ emotions, respond by trying to solve or explain away problems rather than listening and letting the upset or aggrieved feel what they feel and, through dialogue, find their own solutions.
“I think it’s an issue of trusting that you can be imperfect in the conversation,” she said. “Listening is a matter of you deciding you don’t need to worry what to say next,” which then allows “someone else’s opinions and ideas to get past your border defenses.
effective opposition only comes from having a complete understanding of another person’s point of view and how they came to develop it. How did they land where they landed? And how did you land where you landed? Listening is the only way to have an informed response.
Virginia Woolf said, “Words are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries.
Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Open and honest questions don’t have a hidden agenda of fixing, saving, advising, or correcting.
Cultivating self-awareness is a matter of paying attention to your emotions while in conversation and recognizing when your fears and sensitivities—or perhaps your desires and dreams—hijack your ability to listen well
Interestingly, another mental health worker, the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung, early in his career, did a kind of therapeutic improv with patients who wouldn’t speak. He mirrored their gestures and movements until they felt
Theodor Reik, an Austrian psychoanalyst who was one of Freud’s first students, wrote that to listen well is to note the feelings that bubble up from one’s own unconscious: “To observe and to record in memory thousands of little signs and to remain aware of their delicate effects.”
heard” by him and started to talk
Not that practical questions shouldn’t be asked. Of course they should. It’s just when those are the only kinds of questions you ask, the relationship suffers. Open, honest, and exploratory questioning and the genuine curiosity and careful listening it presupposes can not only bring about greater clarity of what’s on someone’s mind but is also the very basis of intimacy.
Listening is about the experience of being experienced
“negative capability,” which he described as “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.