Listening to the Future

Six-year old Jocie wakes her mother up in the middle of the night. She’s scared after they watched a movie about a puppy’s mother who ran away and never came back. Jocie’s mother sees that her daughter is afraid she’ll be left alone, so she promises not to run away and leave her.

But it turns out that Jocie isn’t worried about her mother leaving, she’s anxious about the pet turtle she got recently. What if the turtle is someone’s mother and there’s a baby turtle out there that needs its mother?

What was missing here?

The Stance of Curiosity: Moving from “I understand” to “Help me understand”.

The cornerstone of listening is a willingness to admit we don’t know everything and to be open to what we don’t know.

Listening is only efffective if it is authentic. Authenticity means that you are listening because you are curious and because you care, not because you are supposed to. The issue, then, is this: Are you curious? Do you care?
- Stone, Patton, and Heen, Difficult Conversations

Levels of Listening

1. Opening the ears
When transferring information that seems familiar, we only listen to confirm what they already know. (And there are things we don’t want to hear)

2. Opening the mind
When we open our mind, we can listen attentively for what is different from what we know. We may add this new information to what we know. We are mixing our mind with the mind of another person. (And there are things we don’t want to know)

3. Opening the heart
When we open our heart, we can empathize and take the view of another person. We are feeling toward an understanding of, and respect for, their inner world. We are mixing out heart with the heart of another person. (And there are things we don’t want to feel)

4. Opening completely
When we open completely, we drop out of our personal streams of thought and emotion. We let go and let come. We move into a field of possibility, of fresh ideas, new insights. We are surrendering ourselves to what might be. (And there is a groundlessness we can’t grasp.)

See the following from Otto Scharmer regarding listening and Theory U

• TEDx Talk
• Related Article
• Otto's Web site

Find a Better Job

Listen to this poem at each of the four levels:

Now
That
All Your Worry
Has Proved Such an
Unlucrative
Business,
Why
Not
Find a Better
Job?
- Hafiz, The Gift, p. 254