Since I first encountered Right Speech in 1990, Right Listening has actually been the part that particularly interested me and especially one small aspect of listening: setting your own thoughts and feelings and judgments aside in order to let the other person speak with freedom and increasing depth about who he or she really is and to help that other person find new depths they may not have known before. Gay Luce developed this particular form of Right Speech after some years of Buddhist study and she's the only teacher I've found who explores this particular point. That idea of getting myself out of the way struck me as profound and it is such a departure from the way most of us habitually converse that it has been a great challenge.
I went on to practice Right Speech regularly with a friend, take a Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) course and to study the issue in many texts on Buddhism. It has only been in Gay's work that I've found an emphasis on the idea that as a listener one should try to be wholly present for the other person while keeping one's own opinions, thoughts, projections, etc. out of the conversation. In NLP the practices seemed to me to be designed to manipulate the speaker into tracks chosen by the listener. Other teachers allow practitioners to deduce the speaker's thoughts or fill in the blanks for the speaker in a way that to me misses that nuance of being present yet not personally there.
It's a very tough proposition in our society because we're used to telling other people what we think they should do or what we think they think. I emphasize this particular issue strongly when I teach Right Speech classes and yet when it's time to practice over and over I hear people in the listening position suggesting what the speaker is thinking or feeling. Even among some communication experts I find subtle examples of listeners laying out thoughts for the speaker. A friend recently contacted me to recommend a book on communications skills that she thought was really good. I'd read it already and, while I thought it had much to offer, I didn't like that aspect of the teaching. As my friend and I e-mailed back and forth, I started marshalling my thoughts and decided to make it an Insight.
I think I notice this a bit more than some people might because of my background as a lawyer. Part of the training for trial work is about how to frame questions so that the witness's answer is boxed in to the track the lawyer wants. Now we may not do it with the same adversarial (and even hostile) intent, but in everyday interactions, people frame thoughts for other people all the time.
In Right Listening, the training is that by and large you nod, re-frame (paraphrase what the person just said in order to confirm your understanding of it), reflect back (repeat what the person just said to let him or her know you heard) and only ask questions that are neutral yet invite the speaker to delve farther into the question. I'm not sure whether people just get impatient with taking time to move deep or whether we're so used to psychoanalyzing others that we do it without thinking, but even with the instruction to avoid placing their own construction on the speaker's words, students jump right in with things like, "So it sounds like the problem is that you're really angry with your mother." Now maybe the person has been discussing an uncomfortable situation with his or her mother and speculating about how to handle it and the tone may seem angry, but unless the speaker just said, "I'm really angry with my mother," it's not appropriate for the listener to deduce it.
One example in a book on communication involved a conversation between a nurse and a woman whose husband was dying. At every turn the woman gave a small piece of information and the nurse deduced a huge amount of stuff from it. In one instance the woman merely mentioned that her daughter doesn't talk to her. The nurse concluded that the woman was frustrated because she wanted a different relationship with her daughter. Here's the part that's tricky to get: the woman agreed that that was so -- and the same for the other conclusions to which the nurse jumped. The writer felt this was a great example of wonderful communication skills because the woman felt some relief at being understood and they were ultimately able to reach what probably was the real point in that case.
It's easy to look at a dialog like that and think that you've seen the height of communication skills. And I'm not saying that it's terrible. In fact, it was a far better example of communication than most of what we experience. But the nurse, by deciding for the woman what she meant, exerted a certain amount of control over the direction the conversation took. Even when the speaker says, "Yes," and seems thrilled with the outcome of the discussion, what you can never know is whether there was any other issue that might have come out -- perhaps a deeper core issue that affects other areas of the person's life as well -- but didn't because the discussion was steered into a particular channel instead of being left open. Maybe that woman had issues with her own mother that have impacted many areas of her life. That conversation may have cleared up the issue she confronted that moment, but it foreclosed the possibility of delving more deeply and discovering a key that might have transformed her whole life. I've been involved in practice sessions both as listener and speaker and observer that were handled with such skill on both sides that it suddenly turned into a completely different discussion, taking a direction neither participant anticipated and leading to profound discovery.
When you hear a few things and then deduce what the person is thinking or feeling you insert yourself into their story. Even if you're right, your deduction likely had as much to do with your issues or projections as with the other person. As far as the speaker, some people who are a bit uncomfortable with exploring their feelings will jump on a suggestion that is plausibly in line with their own thoughts. Or they may agree because they've thought of that issue before and they may unconsciously prefer to discuss that one rather than explore down into some other issue that ego has been repressing.
Most people are so thrilled to have someone else even take an interest that they feel moved at a conversation that helps them discover anything. The point is, with the skillful use of right speech you might wind up with the same conclusion you could have reached by suggesting it to the speaker and it may take you far longer to get there by practicing true right listening, but you will have given the speaker the gift of being present in service only of his or her needs. And then again you might help the speaker achieve a revelation you never saw coming. Maybe the insight you perceive easily is only the tip of the iceberg. If you learn to question others in a way that keeps "you" out of it and invites them for their own insights, you will have opened the possibility of discovering more about that person's heart than you imagined.
My friend Sybil is one of the best practitioners of Right Speech and Right Listening that I know. When I have a problem or dilemma she skillfully asks questions that offer no hint of what she might be thinking about what I should do and instead invites me to examine my own feelings about it more deeply than I have on my own. Questions like "Why?" or "How do you feel about that?" or "Is that what you really want?" or "Tell me more," combined with some re-framing and reflecting back, are great ways to invite someone to keep delving into their own thoughts and feelings. Sometimes you may perceive anger or sadness that the other person is not expressing and it's okay to mention your perception as long as you're asking the speaker to clue you in; avoid saying things like "Obviously you're angry about that". Maybe a frown and a clenched jaw on this person means he's trying not to cry. If you label him angry, he's left either having to argue with you or to accept your (incorrect) assessment and you may be helping him to side track his real feeling because it's easier for him to be angry.
It's not the way most of us are going to carry on the average every day conversation (although it would be a great idea) but when someone is struggling with a problem and asking for help or in the midst of a trauma and needing support it is a great opportunity to be of service by being just "the listener" instead of being you. It's a great opportunity to practice detachment, egolessness, service, presence in the moment. Master this one and you've really mastered it all.
