SHOT
Good leaders listen.
CHASER
Listening is way more than being attentive and taking action when someone speaks her/his mind. I have only recently come to this understanding, which, at the age of 55, means I’ve lived the majority of my life thinking otherwise. But I am now convinced that listening, in its fullest sense, is the primary vehicle by which we practice self awareness. Let’s unpack that.
I believe people have varying degrees of self-awareness. The best way I can describe this is that I see people on a spectrum between self-aware and not self-aware. That begs the question: self awareness of what exactly? Of one’s own gifts and limitations. Of one’s needs and motivations. Deeper still, of one’s own trials and traumas (we all have them). Of the things that make us believe what we believe and act the way we act.
Self awareness then ranges from big blind spots to deep clarity. And when I say “deep clarity,” I mean having a relatively healthy balance not just with the things we allow ourselves to see or that we are expecting to see, but the things that we hide or ignore or are not expecting. Not just the things we want to be true about ourselves, but the things that we don’t want to be true, however painful they are. The things that run across the grain of the narratives that we tell about ourselves and our lives. I see self awareness, therefore, as inseparable from self worth and self esteem.
When we listen to other people freely express their own opinions and beliefs, we inherently allow for the possibility of confrontation. Call it what you like—an attack, an argument, an alternative point of view—but it means we are making ourselves vulnerable. We are giving someone the potential to hit us somewhere uncomfortable. In doing so, we create a chain reaction in which we summon—sometimes consciously, sometimes not—our beliefs, values, and experiences and ultimately respond to the threat.
Listening to others talk is only one vehicle by which we can access self awareness and ultimately our self worth. If we allow listening to take on a broader meaning, a sort of openness to perception, a willingness to accept what is there, without judgment, neither speech nor other people are required. We can “listen” by observing, to others and to ourselves.
In leadership terms, listening is work-related, with another person involved, usually driven by an ever-present yet unspoken power imbalance. When we are only listening to ourselves, we face a different reality. We don’t have the immediacy, the inescapable force, of someone in our faces potentially challenging us. In fact, more often than not we insulate ourselves from genuine awareness by virtue of having built a lifetime of defenses that cause our listening to be stunted, to the point where, not only are we not aware we are doing this, but we actually think that it is a strength.
INSIGHT
There is, inside each of us, a person, with gifts and limitations, who is trying to preserve her/his sense of self worth and operate in the world where others, with different gifts and limitations, are trying to do the same. Whether we choose to listen or not, reality—our reality and theirs—continues to unfold.
For this reason, and however uncomfortable it may be, the greatest gift we can give ourselves—never mind others, though they’ll benefit too—is the ability to listen.