Deep Listening

What I mean by deep listening

Many conversations seem to move at lightning speed, with folks itching to get to outcomes, or say their piece. When everyone is aligned, this is great. When different opinions and needs exist, this pace can cause fragmentation. Deep listening is a deliberate paying of attention before employing the fast-paced progress. Through an architecture that makes it easy to orientate, we can reflect on what 'level' or 'level of depth' of listening we are achieving... and through creative practices, we can take a little time to listen to a deeper level, and make sense of what we hear, before progressing. This might incorporate awareness practices, which go beyond words and include body signals, feelings, sensing on a different and more nuanced level than simply listening.

A continuous practice, this still forms the basis of most of my work - listening with deep awareness and sensing the right next move. This is a shared practice, and when teams become attuned to the deep awareness of listening with an open heart, an open mind and an open will (as Otto Scharmer describes it) real transformation can begin to happen almost autonomously.

When can deep listening be helpful?

Every-time. I think as a core capability, this is the number one. Learning to listen with full awareness. The other is learning to speak with intention and say what one means. When those two things combine, communication unlocks and everything else begins to flow. The third part of this puzzle is developing the internal condition within oneself where we are ourselves ready to listen without reacting, and we are ready to speak in a way that is clear and full of meaning but clean of the convoluted structures of blame, shaming, judgement, entitlement and fear that so often creep in when we are talking about things that matter.

Honing this practice of listening deeply, for myself, is a daily practice - im not always perfect at it, but I will continue to practice for my whole life. I always want to create the space for others to enter into this way of relating and from there pay attention to what the entire system needs, from a place of willing-awareness.

Evidence of use

Deep listening shows up across the work pages, usually as the first move before anything else was decided — the CDEC Discovered Stories Shared Communities, Anti-racism and anti-discrimination work, and the local responses to Covid-19 in Kirklees, all began this way.

Related practices