Why Active Listening Does Not Work

Welcome everybody to my typical and usual customary Thursday morning for where I live in California. Live streaming event, and today I'm live streaming on Facebook with a little bit of a link to LinkedIn, not to YouTube. Today's topic is one that I find absolutely fascinating, and it's my explanation of why active listening does not work. And if you happen to be watching this live at the moment, Put in the comment box where you're from and whether or not you have taken any active listening classes. And then after that, put in a yes if active listening has worked for you and you use it on a consistent basis, and no if you don't use active listening on a consistent basis and it has not worked for you. And just put something in the comment box so we can get a sense of where people are at. This is going to be about a 30-minute talk. I'm going to go through it pretty quickly, but you'll be able to go back and watch the recorded video, the replay, if it goes a little fast. So let's go ahead and get started. I'm going to flip myself around here so I'm at the bottom of the screen, and Here we go. So I am a lawyer turned peacemaker, and my profession is helping people minimize conflicts, calm people down, solve problems, and help people make durable agreements for lasting peace. Unfortunately, as I will explain, psychologists and counselors, therapists, peacemakers, and mediators have mistakenly tried to create empathy through this use of I statements in a process that's been called active listening. And I want to talk a little bit about what that is. So first of all, it's really the debate of I statements versus you statements. And I statements are important. But they're not important for creating empathy, and certainly using I-statements for de-escalating anger or managing strong emotions simply does not work. And I'm going to be periodically showing you this link. If there— I have a course up that if you want to learn these skills that I'll be talking about today, here's the link to the courses, Listening Other People Into Existence, and it will teach you everything you need to know if you find that this is useful, and I'll flash this up a couple of more times before we're done with the presentation. The inappropriate use of I statements comes from a misunderstanding of the work of Thomas Gordon, the inventor of active listening, and Marshall Rosenberg, the creator of nonviolent communication. So let's start with active listening and the Gordon model and where that all came from. So Thomas Gordon was an American clinical psychologist and colleague of humanist psychologist Carl Rogers. He was— he went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked with Carl Rogers. And here's a picture of him later in life, and he was widely recognized as a pioneer in teaching communication skills starting in the 1950s. 1950s and 1960s. And in fact, he coined the term active listening to distinguish his method from normal passive listening. In fact, the first reference of the word active listening is in Carl Rogers, one of his last books published, I think, in 1966 or '67. And Rogers— or Gordon contributed a chapter where he talked about the idea of active listening. Well, Gordon believed that I messages would be more effective at resolving potential conflict because he was really concerned about if one's feelings were expressed without blame, the other person would be more likely to change behavior. And his intentions were good, and actually his methodology, while crude, was pretty effective too. So his formula was to talk about the behavior talk about the effect and talk about the feeling of that effect on yourself. So for the sequence, behavior, effect, feeling, put the cause of the feeling on the effect instead of on the behavior. And Gordon thought that this would result in a less defensive reaction from the person responsible for the behavior. So he was one of the first people to try to figure out how do we, how do we express ourselves in a way to not escalate a problem further. So here is, here is the behavior-effect formula. When you fail to deliver your report on time, I feel frustrated and concerned. So the behavior is failing to deliver the report on time. The effect is I feel frustrated and concerned. So now I'm talking about my own emotions. And then the next part is because our production team must have our reports to be efficient, and this is the cause. So it's behavior affecting cause. And the problem with the Gordon System is that the I statements that he uses only apply to someone seeking to change the behavior of another person. So if you have a behavior that's upsetting to me, I would— I can use the Gordon System using I statements to try to change your behavior without making you upset or irritated. But I statements do not apply to empathic statements directed to another. And this was the great misunderstanding that occurred in the late 1960s and on into the '70s when people in the human potential movement and then therapists and counselors and people and mediators, even people in my profession, misunderstood Gordon's stuff. Well, Gordon knew this and he explicitly described active listening as reflecting the feelings of another, especially children, but people confused his work with I-statements as the way to make empathic statements. And so you ended up with this really convoluted formula for expressing empathy, which not only does not work, it really gets people angry. They get pissed off. So you'll hear something like, "What I hear you saying is that you are angry." Or you'll hear something like, "What I think you're feeling is rage." It's a passive voice explanation of what another person is feeling. And it is wrong for a number of reasons. Number one, it's language of disconnection. Whenever you use passive voice in the English language, you are disconnecting yourself as the speaker or the writer from the source of the information. And you'll see passive writing a lot in scholarly work because there's this fake idea of humility, that we want to be distanced personally from whatever it is we're discussing. But the more important reason that this is wrong is because when we use an I statement, we are not directing our attention to the speaker We are directing attention to ourselves and we are trying to soothe our own anxiety, and this is all happening unconsciously. So the reason that I-statements caught on was because counselors and therapists, mediators, psychologists, and people involved with conflict with clients or that they were working with were unconsciously triggered by those emotions, felt anxiety, and glommed onto this idea of using an I-statement, not because it was a good thing to do, but because it soothed their own anxieties. And these statements are no longer truly you-focused, they are I-focused. I'm focusing on me, how I feel when I say I, not you, the listener. And so as a consequence, the upset person hears the I-statement and immediately feels patronized and emotionally invalidated. And we've all had this experience. And many of us have gone through active listening courses where we're taught that this is the conventional wisdom, this is the right way to do things, only to go out and start practicing and realizing, one, it's really awkward, and two, it doesn't work. It really gets people frustrated and escalates problems rather than de-escalates. And of course, as I just said, this usually results in emotional escalation, not de-escalation. Well, as I said, this mistaken formula quickly caught on in the '60s as a way to express empathy, and it's not what— and common experience tells us that it doesn't work. There's no way. Most people hate having I-statements directed to them when they're upset. So this whole idea of active listening is a mischaracterization of Thomas Gordon's work. And because people have never taken the time to go back and read his work and study what he taught, instead they just pass on what they learned from their teacher, who was mistakenly taught by another teacher. And this practice continues to this day. I am still absolutely astounded that in mediation training around the country in the United States, people are still taught to use I statements as a form of active listening. And if you go online and read about this, you will see psychologists and counselors and therapists and mediators and people who, who deal in this work still teaching these I statements, even though it's completely discredited. There is no science to support it and it doesn't work. It's crazy. All right. So now let's talk about nonviolent communication. This is another very popular form of conflict communication that like active listening absolutely does not work. And if there's anybody out there that's taking NVC, or you're an NVC person and you think it's the cat's meow, now called Compassionate Communication, feel free to email me and we can engage in an interesting conversation about this. Because again, NVC is one of those things that got caught on, people thought it was really cool, but it doesn't work. So let me get rid of this. Uh, This is Marshall Rosenberg and, and he was a— here's the interesting stuff that I discovered when I began to research all of this. Rosenberg was also a psychologist. He, he developed nonviolent communication as a conflict resolution process, very similar to Thomas Gordon. And here's where it gets interesting. Rosenberg received a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Madison, the same place where Carl Rogers was teaching and the same place where Thomas Gordon was doing his work. And he met his mentor, humanist psychologist Carl Rogers, and became interested, or actually credits Rogers with alerting him to the skill and value of empathic listening. Well, what's interesting is that if you read all of Rogers' work, he really doesn't talk about empathic listening. He talks about unconditional regard for another. And the person who really started getting into empathic listening was Thomas Gordon. So the parallels become too weird here, too similar to be coincidental. I think what Rosenberg happened is he stumbled across Thomas Gordon's work because although they never allegedly read each other's work or were colleagues of any kind that I can tell, Rosenberg's formulation of Nonviolent Communication is only a slight variation on the Gordon system, as I will show you. I would not be surprised if Rosenberg discovered Gordon's system and just appropriated it to his own use and called it— rebranded it as Nonviolent Communication. So NVC claims to teach people this compassionate communication by focusing on expressing observations, feelings, needs, and requests to others. Very much like the Gordon method. And similar to the Gordon method, NVC emphasizes expressing feelings and needs instead of criticisms or judgments. This is all good, nothing wrong with this at all. Now, the NVC formula is observation, feeling, need, and request, often referred to as OFNR by the NVC people. They have all these great jargons they like to throw around. So observations, feelings, needs, and requests. And so here's a little chart of showing observation, feelings, needs, and requests and how it can all occur. So here's how the formula might work. This is a typical nonviolent communication as taught by practitioners of NVC. I hear you say you won't have the report complete until next week. And I'm feeling some frustration and concern. It is important to me that our team is timely on reports to the production so the production team can be efficient. Would you tell me what's preventing you from completing the report and what our team might do to get it finished by 4 PM tomorrow? Well, for comparison, if you use the Gordon formulation for the same problem, you would say, when you fail to deliver your report on time, I feel frustrated and concerned because our production team needs our reports to be Efficient. Much shorter, much easier to say than that mouthful of NVC talk. The only difference between these formulations is that the NVC formula contains a request while the Gordon system does not. So they're exactly identical, even though it's a little bit more twisted passive voice kind of language, but it's the same basic formula except that Rosenberg tacked on a request at the end and then called it nonviolent communication. Well, here's the problem: nonviolent communication is based on a flawed central premise, and its practitioners describe conflict as originating from unmet human needs. Basically, they are borrowing from Burton's work at George Mason University in the mid-20th century, and he was a proponent of human needs theory, and he contended that all conflict arises from unmet human needs. Well, there is a lot of criticism of that theory, uh, and fundamentally there's no science that supports the hypothesis, and no science can ever support the hypothesis because two central questions bog down Burton and all the needs theorists like NVC people that follow him. First, no one can define what a human need is. We start with Maslow, Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but they are extremely broad in description. He developed this in the 1940s as a way of moving from security to self-actualization. First of all, they are extremely broad categories of needs, and second— well, first of all, science shows us that the perception of need is contextual, not fixed, and so Where you are in your life, your socioeconomic status, even your culture, all influence how you would describe your needs. And thus universal needs cannot be easily described with any kind of particularity. The second problem we have is how do we know when a need has been met? In other words, because needs are personal and very subjective, there's no objective way to measure the satisfaction of a need. You know, you could take a person in Africa and give them three square meals a day, and they would say their needs are pretty well met. And what will happen as they gain a little bit more food security and water security and physical security, their needs will change. Now they have a new set of needs. Now they want to have a job, or they want education, or they want to have more material wealth. And the needs keep changing as socioeconomic and culture changes the context in which somebody is living. Nevertheless, NVC assumes that someone else will fill, will fill my unmet need if I express it non-judgmentally, and that's just not true. There's just no science to support, support that. So the good thing is that NVC practitioners seek to avoid the use of fear, guilt, shame, blame, coercion, or threats when they are seeking to have their needs met. But implicit in this is that we are unable to meet our own needs and are therefore dependent on others. So an NVZ practice practitioner, when asking for a need to be met, is really saying, I can't have this need met on my own. I have to depend on you to meet my need. And that leads to the problem of codependency, which is way beyond the scope of today's talk. But you can see how it, it can lead very easily into destructive relationship behaviors. And the other problem is that many adults never grow out of the infantile need that other people will meet their needs. And this is a problem many, many people face. The vast majority of people, in fact, have this problem. It's all unconscious. They're not aware of it, but it all goes back to their childhood programming. So they become angry and resentful when their needs aren't satisfied. On the other hand, an emotionally self-aware person will not look to another person for love or appreciation or acceptance, but they will find within themselves love, acceptance, and appreciation. They'll love themselves, they'll appreciate themselves, they will accept themselves for who they are. That is the definition of emotional maturity. And when a mature person experiences a loss of love or appreciation or acceptance, she's going to look inside to herself. For all of that, not to externalities, because externalities will never fill those internal feelings. Well, Nonviolent Communication implicitly rejects this idea because we're requesting other people to meet our needs in the moment, and it claims that by stating one's needs openly and honestly, one is more likely to have another peace— person fulfill those needs without conflict. And that's just not true. There are other problems with nonviolent communication. In, in addition to resting on this flawed premise, researchers who have investigated the efficacy of nonviolent communication have found that learning and mastering the practice is difficult. It's not easy to learn because it's an unnatural way of thinking and communicating, and skilled practitioners have to be self-aware, they have to be schooled in advanced verbal skills, and they have to make all of this sound really natural. And most people are not motivated to take the months and months and months and months it takes to master these skills. Second, it takes time, discipline, and patience to use Nonviolent Communication skills. And the problem is, and I can tell you this from personal experience and observation, is that most conflict situations arise extremely quickly and don't allow for the extended discourse that's required by NVC basics. Third, it's a— NVC is a communication from the speaker's frame of reference, and it cannot be used and will not be used and is not effective at de-escalating anger or strong emotions. At best, it can help a practitioner call out a problem or an offense without hopefully escalating anger further. However, if your intention is to calm an angry person down, NVC will not work. It will only make matters worse. It will not de-escalate anger or incipient violence because it is I-centered, not you-centered, and really the speaker's emotional experience is not important to the Nonviolent Communication practitioner. Fourth, and As with the Gordon System, many people feel manipulated, patronized, and they feel like people are being rude when an NVC practitioner attempts to have a compassionate communication. That's because the phrasing is so awkward and they use the I statements and it's not focused on the speaker at all. It's like I'm using this technique and because this is such a cool technique, you're going to automatically calm down. And aren't I cool because I can use this technique and you can't. I mean, there's a real air of superiority around all of this that is really difficult, uh, for people who are incensed and angry and emotionally upset. Fifth, nonviolent communication will lead to very crude paraphrasing, which people— leaves people feeling discomforted by the directive or subjective reflection. So actually, in the practice of NVC, people end up doing exactly what they say they're not going to do. They end up being implicitly judgmental, critical, and saying— and basically saying, I'm using this cool technique on you and you should calm down, or you should meet my needs, or you should basically behave the way that I'm expecting you to behave, which is exactly what they say they don't want to do. But that is the end result of NDC practice. So let's now talk about what does work. So here are 5 eye-opening truths about reflective listening. Notice that I'm calling it reflective listening, not active listening. And the reason that I call it reflective listening is because proper listening, not conversation, listening, requires the listener to reflect information back to the speaker at 4 different levels. Since I've mentioned those levels, I might as well tell you what they are: mirroring, paraphrasing, core messaging, and affect labeling. Mirroring is when you repeat back word for word what the other person spoke. This was an early kind of adoption of so-called active listening, and of course we know we hate being mirrored like a monkey when somebody is trying to soothe us or calm us down or show that they're listening to us. The only time we use mirroring is when two people have to be on the same page about a procedure or a list or a recipe or an algorithm or a process. So for example, I'm a pilot, instrument-rated pilot, and if when I get a clearance from air traffic control, the air traffic controller reads I file a written request for routing through the air navigation. The air traffic controller will then read— when I'm ready to go, will, will pull up my request, read the clearance, and then I am required to mirror back that clearance word for word, exactly correct, in a certain particular formula. And the reason for that is very clear: it's safety. There is Not a lot of fun having a crushed aluminum at 8,000 feet in the clouds. So we have to have perfect clarity over what I'm going to do and what the air traffic controller expects me to do, and that's when mirroring is most effective. Um, paraphrasing is— you all know what paraphrasing is. It's simply the idea of restating what somebody else has said, their words, with your own words. Core messaging starts to ignore the words and pays attention to what the speaker's meaning is. What, what is the speaker trying to say? From a meaning perspective, not from just words. And finally, affect labeling is reflecting back this, you ignore the words and reflect back the speaker's emotional experience that the speaker is having in the moment. So those are the four levels of reflective listening. In all of those four levels of reflective listening, you are using you statements, you are not using an I statement. And as Gordon teaches correctly, I statements should only be used to state your own feelings. I am angry. I am frustrated. And Gordon and Rosenberg were both right to teach statements when you talk about your own feelings. So you should say something like, I'm anxious and angry. I'm frustrated. I'm sad. And I'm all alone. When you use I statements for your own stuff, nobody can take that away from you because they're your emotions. You own them. And it's perfectly okay for you to talk about your own feelings and emotions by using an I-statement. And again, I'm giving you a brief overview of what is covered in the Listen Others into Existence course that you can find on this link here. I'll leave it here for a second. So when you label your own feelings using an I-statement, you are doing a process known as first-party affect labeling. And this is a powerful process for calming yourself down in any emotional situation. So if you find that you're angry or upset or frustrated and you say, I'm really angry, I'm really frustrated, all of a sudden your brain will start to calm down. And there's all kinds of scanning study, brain scanning studies that show how and why this works. And if anybody is interested in getting a list of all those studies, just email me at Doug@dougnull.com. And I'll be happy to reply back with a link to all of the studies that have been done in this work to show you there's just a lot of brain science that supports everything that I'm talking about today. When you state, if you state your feelings aloud, of course, no one has a right to question, judge, or invalidate you. Your emotions are what they are and you own them. Now, here is the problem. We live in a society that privileges rationality over emotions. And oftentimes when we express our own emotional experience, like I'm really angry or I'm really upset, I might make an untrained, emotionally immature person nervous because they're going to become anxious around my emotionality. It's all unconscious. They may not even know that they're anxious, but they feel it. And so what they are going to do in a knee-jerk reaction because they don't know any better is to emotionally invalidate me. And they might say something like, well, Doug, it's not that big a deal, or Doug, you're making a mountain out of a molehill, or Doug, don't be such a drama queen. Phrases like that, that is called emotional invalidation, and it is very demeaning and emotionally abusive. And we, until we know better, until we've been trained, we all do it, and we especially do it to children. So one of the reasons why people are reticent around expressing their emotional experience with I-statements is because more likely than not, by expressing their emotionality using an I-statement, the people around them are going to get anxious and emotionally invalidate. And that hurts, and it's harmful, and it's abusive. But people do it anyways because they don't know any better. Stating your emotions from your perspective only becomes a problem when you blame somebody else for making you feel the way you do. So if I said something like, I'm really angry because you just screwed up that job, that would be inappropriate, and that will lead to escalation of a conflict into an argument and maybe beyond. So for example, I'm anxious and angry because of you, or you make me anxious and angry— you would never say something like that. That is an inappropriate use of a you statement, uh, and All you need to say is, "I'm anxious and angry," without attributing the cause of that anxiety or anger to a person. What you wanna do is focus on the behavior, not the person. And of course, this is what Gordon teaches, and it's absolutely correct. When you talk in a loud voice at me, I get anxious and angry. That's perfectly okay. The other thing to remember is that I statements should never be used to establish empathy. So you're never going to use an I statement in any kind of expression of empathy. And unfortunately, this error has existed for over 60 years in the caring professions. It's wrong. It's still being taught. And it boggles my mind that people teach stuff that they know doesn't work. So here are some examples of what you're not going to say. What I see you feeling is anxiety or anger, or, 'It sounds to me like you are angry,' or 'What I hear you saying is...' No, those are wrong formulations. You're only being selfish. You're soothing yourself when you do that, and you're only causing the problem to get worse, not better. As I said, this is emotionally invalidating, rude, patronizing, and manipulative. And the proof is in the pudding. You all had people say these kinds of things to you, and you don't like it. So my admonition is don't inflict this on other people. So that gets us to the proper use of you statements. You statements should be used to reflect back another person's emotions. We call this third-party ethic labeling. And Gordon was wrong to declare that you statements should never be used because, as I said before, brain science establishes that the power of third-party ethic labeling works. It, However, it only works when you use a you statement to reflect back another person's emotions. So you would say something like this to somebody who was anxious and angry. You would say, you just tell them what they're feeling. You are anxious, angry. You are frustrated. Now, a lot of people will say, well, why? That's pretty silly. Why should I tell somebody what they're feeling? Don't they know what they're feeling? And the short answer is no, they don't. They're typically alexithymic. When they're anxious and angry or frustrated. And far beyond the scope of today's talk to do that, but if you take the course that I flashed on the screen, we go into the brain science behind all of this and why it's so critical that you reflect back emotions with a you statement. The other thing that you want to be careful about is not to add any reason for why the person might be having an emotional experience. Because you really don't know. So you're gonna keep your use statements really short, direct, and simple. Gordon correctly states that use statements should never be used to label, judge, or condemn. He's absolutely right about that. And here's the thing, this kind of deep reflective listening where you're ignoring the words, reading the emotional data fields, and reflecting back the emotions with a simple you statement is the most powerful relationship tool in your box. If you just remember these 4 simple tools— when to use I statements, when not to use I statements, when and how to use you statements— you're going to see immediate and profound transformations around you. You're going to move out of that old, discredited, ineffective active listening to the modern 20th century, 21st century skill of reflective listening, the 4 levels of reflective listening. So there's a lot more that you can learn about this. Go to my website and check out this course, dougnoll.com/LP/listen-others-into-existence. And when you do that, you will learn some very profound skills that will absolutely transform your life. Well, that's the end of today's live stream, and if you enjoyed it, uh, please put a comment in the box telling us that you liked it. And I will be back next week. This one I did not promote too much, but I think next week I'll do some more promotions. And hopefully we'll see you next Thursday. At 11 AM Pacific for another livestream on all of these kinds of really fascinating topics. So thanks for watching, and we will see you soon.