Empathy: Sensitive Listening
Learning to listen, this forgotten art
Our tendency to fragment is stronger than the need to integrate. We don’t know how to listen. When someone speaks to us, instead of listening to what they have to say until the end, we immediately start comparing it with our own ideas and previous references. This mental process — which I call agree-disagree automatism — when taken to extremes, is very limiting. Listening until the end, without agreeing or disagreeing, is very difficult for all of us. We don’t know how to handle — even temporarily — the unfamiliar or the unknown.
The agree-disagree automatism works like this: when our interlocutor begins to speak, we immediately take two attitudes: a) “I already know what they’re going to say and I agree; therefore, I won’t waste time listening”; b) “I already know what they’re going to say and I disagree; thus, I have no reason to listen to them until the end.” In both cases, the result is the same: we deny the person speaking the capacity or possibility to say something new — which in practice can amount to denying their existence.
Try it for yourself: attempt to listen until the end, without agreeing or disagreeing, to what your interlocutor is saying.
Try to avoid thinking about how you’ll respond after just the first few sentences. You’ll see how difficult it is. And you’ll realize that this automatism is one of the most powerful manifestations of our mind’s conditioning through the ‘either/or’ mental model — binary logic.
The main goal of dialogue is this: to address the agree-disagree automatism. To try to mitigate our conditioning, to seek alternatives to our habitual attitude. From these observations, one can deduce the main utility of the dialogic method: to perceive and think about the same questions differently, so that new ideas may emerge. Later on, these ideas can be evaluated, judged, potentially resulting in the implementation of non-repetitive actions, different from the routine.
The basic question of dialogue is simple and can be stated as follows: ‘What if we suspend — at least temporarily — our ‘certainties’, and converse outside of their influence to see what happens?’ Or, put another way: to change how we look at things, to modify our perspective, to observe from different angles, to think about the same problems differently. It follows, then, that this method applies to any context where it is necessary to change the habitual way of perceiving the world. The educational sphere and the business universe are two such domains. Indeed, in many organizations across various countries, the dialogic method is used in this way.”
“In sensitive listening, it’s not about guiding the unknown into the familiar or trivializing differences, but rather fostering a dynamic of creativity, assuming assumptions to allow the emergence of meaning, something that didn’t exist before but was potentiated, creating space for its updating. Sensitive listening involves an exercise of self-sacrifice, allowing another level of consciousness to express itself beyond the words heard, aiming to reach the soul of the speaker.”
