The Listener

Weekly Presence Prompt

Kathy Lubar, co-author of Leadership Presence

The quality of listening changes everything. An audience can change the performance. We have all experienced this—the kind of listening that can transform our own thinking, feeling, outlook, emotional state. The kind of listening that is focused, unconditional, and for the speaker. The listener has no personal needs to be fulfilled, no motive, other than to bear witness and follow the speaker.

There is no, “listening in order to…” fix the problem, get closer, convince, feel good about myself, make a friend, seduce a lover, move on to our own telling, take a turn, find out if I like them…

It is a selfless and generous act.

Recently, I had the chance to spend time with such a listener. We spent a wide open week in a small wild town on the far side of an island in Hawaii. A dear friend, but one I’d never had the luck to have such unstructured time with just the two of us.

We walked, we talked, we listened. We told stories we’d told before now with a granular view, a more pixelated complexity. We revisited her husband, George Kinder’s Three Questions. I have pondered and written on these questions many times over the last 20 years. Beautiful, heart-stopping questions that help us think through our deepest desires for this one precious life.

This time, though, I had Kathy as a listener. And suddenly the answers to the questions moved from my head (where I mostly reside) to my heart to some deeper place, almost unknown to me. A discovery.

Kathy listened lightly, softly, not with intensity of purpose, but with an open witnessing. I imagined that as I spoke, small sparks were flying here and there and Kathy would swiftly reach out and catch a certain spark just before it burnt out, bringing it back delicately, offering it to me: “What about this? Say more about this? This seems important.” I was tossing away my dreams and Kathy saw what was precious and rescued it for me.

We are lucky when we find ourselves with a Listener. And it’s no surprise that Kathy is a life-long meditator and Buddhist practitioner and teacher.

As communicators, this skill of listening is perhaps the most needed, the most sophisticated, and the simplest.

What are the skills of Listeners? The biggest challenge is putting away expectation and our own needs, preferences, and judgements. It is like a meditation; we focus on one thing, in this case we focus on the other. And when thoughts of ourselves, our upcoming appointments, our fixes and judgements arise, we allow them to float on by without ascribing meaning. And bring ourselves back to the other. Again.

Logistically, having unbookended time, time to meander, certainly helps. But can we create bubbles of unstructured time in a busy world? Can we make a cup of tea over 20 minutes expansive and endless?

When we do that, we are free to be present, check our egos and our internal to-do lists, and listen.

Today, we start with 10 minutes dedicated to the practice of listening without expectation, only for the other. An offering, a gift, a witnessing.

See what shifts.

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