By Stu Whitley
Bio
This post is second in a three-part series.
In our relationships, as with our work, listening is absolutely
fundamental to leadership and the discipline of effective
communication. This includes the need to be alert for situations where
cocking one’s ear to the rhythms of speech, as well as its content,
will ensure better understanding. To do this in the context of
conversation means to project positive non-verbal behaviour, to avoid
being captured by words that we know can provoke negative emotions, by
not interrupting, and by silently analyzing as dialogue
proceeds.
When witnesses testify, when judges speak, when communities express
concern, or when a victim expresses doubt, we sometimes—often—hear only
what we want to hear, and dismiss the rest. In doing so, we overlook
the lesson of one of the primal aboriginal teachings: to hear the most
important part of the message, it is necessary to hear with the eyes
and the heart. There is a passage from T.S. Eliot that in
particular
commends itself to this subject:
There’s always something
one’s ignorant of
About anyone, however well
one knows them;
And that may be something of
The greatest importance.
In the 17th century, Francis Bacon tried
to move critical analysis away from scholasticism and the renaissance
fascination with ancient wisdom by identifying cognitive obstacles to
clear thinking. There were four such barriers, or “idols” as he termed
them, which impaired our ability to observe or
listen:
- Idols of the cave, which
are individual
peculiarities - Idols of the
marketplace, which are the limits of language - Idols of
the theatre, or pre-existing
beliefs that tend to script how we react to things,
and - Idols of the tribe, which are
inherited foibles of human
thought.
Thinking about,
and being aware of these impediments can help alleviate their
influence. Modern researchers have concluded that these cognitive
barriers reveal themselves in biases of which we’re often unaware. For
example, the bias called ‘blind
spot’ has been clinically demonstrated in modern subjects
who consistently recognized the existence of various cognitive biases
(such as cooperativeness, friendliness, selfishness, cheerfulness—or
the lack thereof) in others, but failed to see those biases in
themselves.
An interesting cognitive disability is
the ‘impostor
syndrome’, characterized by a pervasive feeling that one
is scamming everyone else about one’s skills and competencies. Oddly,
it can drive people to over-compensate, causing them to be high
achievers. But more often, there is a risk that such people will hear
criticism in the tone or messages of colleagues that is not
there.
Similarly, we tend to see ourselves in a
better light than others see us (the ‘self-serving bias’). We often, quite naturally,
attribute higher motives to ourselves than those which move other
people. Unconscious bias in the listening context can be overcome by
empathy, which I consider to be one of the principal hallmarks of the
mature adult. Self-awareness is another.
Bacon
eloquently observed that “…the mind of man is far from the nature of a
clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect
according to their time incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted
glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not deterred and
reduced.”
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