Listening--Dialogue Part 2

Dialogue requires two sets of skills:  Interpersonal skills and intellectual skills.  The interpersonal skills make it possible for the relationship to be maintained in order for dialogue to occur.  The intellectual skills are the cognitive abilities to engage the subject matter.  Obviously these two set of skills overlap however, I think it’s helpful to divide them and discuss each set.  The interpersonal skills I would identify are: listening, patience, authenticity, and inclusion.

 

Listening comes in different forms.  We listen for different reasons and attend to different things.  Empathic listening occurs when a person listens in order to offer support to another person.  Much of the listening I do as a pastor is empathic listening.  Frequently, when I make hospital calls someone will ask how the person I visited was doing.  If they ask me to report too much of the medical data, they find I’m not a wealth of information.  In these days of privacy, I don’t really like discussing another’s person’s medical condition anyway.  But, truth be told, the listening I do at hospitals is not geared toward people’s physical condition.  I am listening to see if they are feeling in control of their circumstances or feeling powerless.  Powerlessness is a prominent feeling in hospitals.  If it sets in, it can delay a person’s recovery and frustrate them long past the hospital stay.  Similarly, I’m listening for the ways that the illness affects the person’s self-perception.  For some people a hospital stay is a stark reminder or their mortality.  Issues of life and death become important.  For others, a hospital stay is a necessary means to an end.  Still others find it a helpless intrusion on the plans they have made.  My responses to a person have a lot to do with whether they are fearful, hopeful or frustrated (or any of the varying emotions a person may encounter in the hospital).  The point is, empathic listening listens for the emotional and spiritual state a person is in.

 

Second, we listen for information.  Listening for information occurs whenever we need to know something—directions on how to get somewhere, a customer’s orders, the material for the test.  Empathic listening and listening for information can often interfere with each other.  If I’m supposed to be listening empathically and I stress getting the facts straight, I’ll probably end up frustrating the person—people who are struggling are frequently incoherent with regard to facts.  Similarly, if I’m concerned with the feelings of the person giving me an order for a purchase, I may end the conversation by having them repeat the information they gave me which will leave them feeling frustrated—prompting another round of empathic listening.

 

Finally, we listen to assess the legitimacy of a person’s ideas.  This is called critical listening.  Critical listening need not be adversarial.  It doesn’t need to be combative.  However, it does need to happen whenever someone seeks to persuade us.  Stephen Toulmin, in his book Uses of Arguments indicates that an argument contains a claim (what the persuader is trying to get people to believe or do), data (the facts and/or generally accepted chunks of information) and warrant (the logical link between the claim and the data).  Critical listening is listening to understand the claim being made, the data provided for the claim and the warrant connecting them.  In practice, arguments contain several interlocking sets of claims, data and warrants.  Similarly, people trying to persuade other people are not always clear about what is their claim or their data or their warrant.  Critical listening seeks to identify each of these in the mind of the listener. 

 

Critical listening should ask more than, “Do I agree or disagree with the claim?”  The best critical listening examines the quality of the data, the acceptability of the data and the logic that links the two.  Several years ago, Apple computers were priced significantly higher than IBM compatible computers (this was during the day when we actually referred to computers as IBM compatible). I was shown two editorials—one in favor of Mac’s and one in favor of IBM clones.  Both articles used the same data—Apple’s cost more than IBM’s et al.  However, the one favoring the Macs said, “You get what you pay for.”  While the other saw the price as being an argument against the Apple—same data, different claims, different warrants.  The critical listener considers the merits of the whole argument. 

 

We identify the type of listening that occurs in order to respond to each situation with sensitivity and effectiveness.