Doug Noll explains why we avoid deep listening: fear of being wrong, cultural dismissal of emotion, and anxiety about intimacy. He breaks down four levels of reflective listening and argues that practicing in low-stakes situations builds the confidence to engage with someone's actual feelings.
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It is scary in the beginning until you start using it, and then it becomes self-affirming very carefully. And so the question is, why is it scary? We are doing something that that number one is counterintuitive to anything that we've ever learned before. And two, it is requiring us to pay attention to the emotionality of another human being, which goes— flies in the face of Western cultural norms. And we are also, at least in the beginning, there's a fear of being wrong or of being perceived as impertinent or impudent or manipulative or any other thing. We have issues around our own self-esteem that if we make a mistake or we're going to be perceived somehow weirdly or stupidly, that that's going to look badly on us. So typically the fear around using these skills has to do with those three things. So let me just go through them very quickly. First of all, this is counterintuitive. We'll get into this more deeply maybe tonight, but certainly next week, 4 levels of reflective listening: mirroring, paraphrasing, core messaging, and affect labeling. The thing about listening is that we've never really been taught how to listen. We've been taught how to understand words, but words only constitute 7% of everything that's communicated. 93% of what's being communicated is communicated through body language, through our eyes, our facial expression, and the tonality of our voice. And we were not taught from the time we begin to speak, we're never taught how to listen. We're told to pay attention to the words, but that's not listening. And so, so when we start paying attention to the emotions, for example, or what the real meaning of what a speaker is trying to say, this is a new skill. It's like riding a bicycle, and it's a little intimidating. In the beginning. And I find that the biggest barrier that people have is exactly what Jeannette expressed. It's scary. It can be a little scary, socially scary. The second thing is that our Western culture makes this a very, again, counterintuitive idea because from the time of 3,000 years ago, even longer, Western philosophers and even Western religion has, has said that what separates human beings from other animals is rationality, being a rational being. So Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Augustine, Descartes, I mean, you go through the whole history of philosophical thinking, all the writers talk about is how emotions are bad and rationality is where we should be at. And this has been drilled into us from the time we were very little children. But what neuroscience is teaching us is that we are not rational beings. We are emotional beings and we have, we have moments of rationality but not a lot of rationality. We are mostly emotional beings all the time and if we didn't have emotions we couldn't be rational. Emotions have to precede rationality and the reason for that is because emotions make us pay attention to our environment. Emotions create reality for us. Without emotions, we have no clue about what's going on around us. We would not even know to use rational thinking or reasoning or critical problem solving unless we had an emotional experience that told us that there was a problem to be solved in the first place. But most people don't understand that. They just think we got a problem solver, we got to be reasonable, and they look at emotions as being irrational or bad. You know, we'll talk about emotional invalidation in more detail later on. And this is what we do because we are so trained against emotions that we emotionally invalidate each other. So that's the second strike against this. And then the third strike is that we are now listening to people in a very intimate way. I mean, we're basically at core— at the core messaging and affect labeling level, the deepest levels of listening, we are basically jumping into their emotional experience and sharing it with, with the other person. And that can be very scary because we've— so many people have used active listening on us and we found it to be smarmy and manipulative and ineffective and all it does is get us mad and we're afraid that if we use these skills that we're going to be— we're either going to re-escalate people, get them angry, make people feel like we're not being authentic or manipulative or whatever it might be. Lots of fears around that. And that's a legitimate theory because the term active listening was coined in 1957 by Carl Rogers, and although he was very effective as a clinician, he never really explained what he did to anybody, and it wasn't until we got the Lieberman study in 2007 that we really understood much better why listening to emotions is so much more powerful than anything else. And so this is all brand new science. Really brand new science. So we overcome fear with practice, and we start practicing in very low-risk situations. And as you practice the skill, as you practice listening and paying attention, after you've done it 4 or 5 times and you start to say, oh wow, I'm really getting a reaction, you'll start to see that it's not so scary, and you will actually start to gain confidence. And then you can start growing the— start experimenting with the skill in other places.
