This content was created by Doug Noll. This content was uploaded by Doug Noll. This is a YouTube talk titled "Doug Noll on Deep Listening" (uploaded 2014-04-29) in which Doug Noll speaks about the practice of deep listening. The excerpt is a monologue focusing on how listening differs from having a conversation, how cultural and professional training (e.g., in law school) conditions people to listen for words and facts, and the claim that effective listening attends to deeper signals beyond words. Content type: YOUTUBE; speaker: Doug Noll; topic: deep listening and communication skills.
Chapters
There are a lot of different reasons why you might want to listen, but creating an empathic connection is one of them, but not having the bonding experience of just talking, having a conversation with a friend. That is not listening. That's having a conversation. And as long as you understand that listening is its own separate skill set, it will help the problem of familiarity, for example, where you have conversations with a close friend or partner but you never— but you forget to listen because you don't understand or always recognize that listening is its own separate skill. The other thing is that what do we— when we— as we grow and become acculturated from the time we're children, what are we taught to listen for? When we're told to listen, what do we basically listen for in our culture every day? We're told— we're lawyers. I know they're— Francisco, you're a lawyer, right? Oh, you're not a lawyer. I'm a metaphysical lawyer. Metaphysical lawyer, okay. I know Deb's a lawyer, I'm a lawyer. I will tell you, in law school, we are taught to listen for the facts. Who, what, when, where, why, how. Anything objective. And we are taught to listen to the words because the words are the most important thing. The words convey objective information from which we can draw conclusions and gather information. It turns out, it turns out that effective listening means that you ignore the words. In fact, we will, I will show you in a little while that you can listen to somebody, never take a note, and if you listen properly, you can repeat back exactly what they say and you never have to worry about taking notes again listening to somebody if you ignore the words. The moment you start paying attention to the words and that's all you listen to, all kinds of problems start to occur. And we'll talk about that in a little bit more detail in a few minutes. So, the key here is that deep listening is powerful and transformative. It is not a conversation. And it is a separate and different skill than just having a conversation. Listening also does not involve listening to words. It involves listening to something else much deeper than that.
