Generative listening

ocial networks reflect the impoverishment of our interpersonal communication: we launch a topic with our own point of view, more or less provocative. Ideally, our post generates reactions: other people's points of view, fragments of opinions, justifications, trivialities, often without any real context. Occasionally, a debate ensues among some about who's right, always with a touch of self-promotion. In the end, without any evolutionary results, or even any action. It's the social networks, we say!

"No, I don't agree!"

At meetings, we tend to observe the same routines, preventing any real dialogue on the subject:

• Talking nice / Parler gentiment - participants don't say what they think, but what the hierarchy would like to hear.
• Downloading - participants listen to what they already know in order to reconfirm knowledge already acquired.
• Fighting - participants listen to be right. They confront each other to assert their points of view.

"Words," wrote Ursula K. Le Guin in her ongoing meditation onthe magic of true human communication, "transform both speaker and listener; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it." But what happens in a cultural ecosystem where the listener has disappeared and the speaker has multiplied? Where do transformation, creation, innovation and understanding go?

So what skills do we need to learn or relearn to turn platitudes into points of view, firm views into openness, debates into dialogue and deadlocks into creations?

The great philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm (1900-1980) answered this question at a seminar in Switzerland in 1974. The script was published after his death under the title Von der Kunst des Zuhörens - The Art of Listening:

"Listening is an art like understanding poetry. Like any art, it has its own rules and standards:

1. The listener concentrates entirely on listening (and on the personality of another person). Nothing else needs to be more important to him, he has freed himself from fear and selfishness.

2. The listener develops a free imagination that is concrete enough to be expressed in words. They are capable of empathy with others, and can feel the other's experience as if it were their own.

3. Such empathy requires the capacity to love. Understanding another person means loving them, not in the erotic sense. This makes it possible to reach out to the other person and overcome the fear of losing oneself in the relational process.

4. Listening is the psychoanalytic process of understanding and becoming aware of unconscious and repressed feelings and thoughts, as well as their roots and functions.

5. The listener doesn't try to lie in his reactions and answers. He is never interested in trying to please or make an impression. Having worked on himself to know himself better, he rests in himself.

6. Understanding and loving cannot be separated. If they are nevertheless separated, every (interested) conversation becomes always and only a small talk, a superficial conversation, an exchange of words and the door to real understanding remains closed."

Take the time to listen, not to respond but to understand.

Like every behavior and action, everything depends on our inner posture:

• Truly listeningrequires 100% presence. Forget about multi-tasking!
• True listeningrequires empathy. Let's connect for win-win or give-and-take results!
• Truly listeningrequires the will to bring about something new for the common good. Let's co-create a balanced world in which we want to live!

To make progress on the 4Ps - Planet, People, Profit, Peace - let's adopt generous listening more often.

To understand and developyour generous listening skills

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