“Active Listening” Paraliminal with Dr. Paul Scheele

Today we're playing with a paralympical that's called active listening. I really want to put a shout out to our dear friend and colleague Deborah Poneman, who was a great consultant on this particular program. Active listening is something that I've been teaching for decades around the concept of using our nonverbal behaviors most effectively. When we are communicating in a way that is really connecting with people. What happens is all of our nonverbal behaviors are congruent with the message that we're trying to articulate. I'll give you another way of thinking about this. If you're agreeing with somebody, you'd go, uh huh, uh huh. You wouldn't go, mm, yeah, sure, I agree with you. Oh, yeah, no, I believe everything that you're saying. What you would do is you would be congruent in your verbal and nonverbal behavior. One of the things that Deborah Poneman brought in was an idea that I actually just recently got to come to an appreciation of. It's this idea of social capital or. Or relationship capital. There's an idea that when we interact with somebody, we're building points of goodwill. And you might build, say, 10 points of goodwill over a period of a year of authentically showing up with somebody, helping them to trust you for who you are and that you have a mutually desired interest. Interest to be with the person that you're communicating with. Now, as soon as you tell your friend about someone else who you really trust, that person immediately has a hundred points of goodwill. And what's interesting about this is this idea of what is the capital that's really being exchanged here? What's the value that's here? And this idea of relationship capital, or a sense of goodwill, the ability to help or serve someone else in getting to where they want to go. That's the real currency of relationships. Now if you have something to say to somebody and you want to tell them, give them a big download of everything you know. A key idea here is that.

People don't care what you know until they know that you care.

So how do you create.

A positive engagement with another person in order for that to occur? To let them know that you really care and to have them really care about what anything is that you might have to say.

This is really what active listening is about, building relationship capital. Creating an environment in which there is an honest and authentic exchange of information that will help you be most effective in any interaction that you have with others. And what you're doing during the paraliminals, you're actually Practicing that you're envisioning someone that you would have like to have good communication with. And you're playing that out in your mind using the techniques that are taught during the paralimal. So in a way, it's stepping into a very resourceful state where you are an active listener. Now, there's really four levels of listening that the MIT Dialogue Project talked about. The first level is called downloading. That's where you just data dump to someone else. The second level is debating. This is where it sounds like you're having a conversation, but you're really.

Arguing about a point that you have and a point that the other person has that's debating. The third level is active listening. This is where true dialogue begins to occur because you're listening into what each other are saying. And that listening in that ability gives us the ability to think together. Dialogos where we're actually sharing an honest, authentic sharing that's occurring between you and another person. The fourth level of listening, which is something that we teach in the deeper programs of engagement that we have, is something called co presencing. That's where we discover that the really important thing that's happening between two people is not the sharing that's occurring with what's between our ears, it's what's occurring between our noses. There is a presence of the future that's trying to emerge. And you and the other person simultaneously start getting insight into what's really occurring, what's trying to show up here? Why are we together? And how is our being together actually an enhancement for both of us? So that's a powerful level of connecting with another person. You have to be able to have this active listening first. So one of the things that I teach, and I don't know if you've ever heard me say this, but if you want to really attend to someone who is speaking, you want to attend to the message that that person is communicating. A great way to do that is to look at their eyes and look at the gestures that they're doing with their hands.

While simultaneously you're aware of yourself and what your hands are doing.

Cool. Because what this does is it gives us a simultaneously a simultaneous awareness of three points of view. The first point of view, or perceptual position that we maintain is ourselves. Through our eyes, through our ears, we're aware of ourselves. Second, perceptual position is the other person. So what does the other person look like? What's the sound of their voice? What's their tonality? What are the words that they're saying, what gestures are they engaging in? The third end, if you can see through their eyes at you, which is really a cool thing to do, it's the idea of walk a mile in another person's moccasins or see the relationship from the other side of the table. What is the other person actually seeing and hearing when you're communicating? So that's second perceptual position. Third perceptual position is the context of what's happening as you and the other person are interacting. It's almost as if you're up there on the ceiling looking back at you two communicating.

And when you do this little technique of seeing the other person's eyes and their hands while simultaneously aware of your own hands, you have an amazing ability to suddenly be very present. Now, why active listening is so important right now is that there's so much noise in our environments. There's so many things that are distracting us. So many things have our attention. And while we like to think, oh, we can multitask, the truth is that most stimuli that are trying to get your attention are distracting. It's like driving the car while drinking a cup of coffee, combing your hair, brushing your teeth, and cooking a bowl of soup on the dashboard. There's too much going on almost all the time. And what we have to be able to do is, is we have to be able to say, okay, the rest of that world, it's not important right now. The most important person in this world right now is a person who's standing or sitting directly in front of me.

And when you can do that now, you can really attend to what's happening. But if your phone goes off, if you're looking here, if you're going like that.

Disaster. I remember years ago, the business partner that I set up Learning Strategies with back in 1981, we were consultants for a big company in the Midwest and we were meeting with a very high powered director of a huge division of this company. And we met at fancy restaurant to really get to know him. It was being brokered by a training person from within the company. So my partner Mark and I were sitting there and as we were listening, asking questions and listening to this person speak, somebody walked into the restaurant. And Mark noticed the person and said, paul, isn't that John?

And I looked up and I nodded and came back to the person who was speaking.

And his face suddenly just went completely blank, got really angry and just started eating. And the consultant, the training consultant that had brought us in, said, jim, Is there a problem? He said, well, these young men obviously don't want to hear anything I have to say, so I'm just going to eat my lunch and go.

It was that brief of a moment when that person's full attention wasn't being given to him. We were not attending to every word he was saying. He just glanced up like that, and complete destruction of trust. Now, it's interesting that this person actually had a history of doing that kind of thing for others, but nevertheless, it was a dramatic demonstration of how powerfully we are always attending to the complete package of communication that's going on in front of us. And somebody who's going like this or, you know, looking at their.

Phone and they're doing things like that while you're talking.

They'Re not hearing you.

And if you're doing that while somebody else is talking, you're not hearing them. You could claim you're multitasking, but I guarantee you're missing things that are being said.

So active listening is about choosing to intentionally be in the space where the most important person at this moment is the person communicating directly in front of you, where all of your attention, all of your verbal and nonverbal communication skills are being used to not only listen and actively engage, but. But also to be able to present information to the other person. Not to download or not to debate, but to truly dialogue, to share information, to think or to inquire together about the next steps that are desired to be taken at this time. Then we really understand that every relationship that we're in.

Is for a purpose. There is always a mutually beneficial outcome that is being realized when you're communicating with another person. The more attentive you can be to what those outcomes are, what the benefits are, the more your mind, your body, can strive to help that purpose be fulfilled. Well, enjoy listening to this active listening program. It's such a blast and such a joy to be able to make it. We'll see you on the next session. Thanks for joining. Bye for now.