SEE Lens: Listening
Listening is a multimodal enigma. We, humans, have done it for millennia, and individually depend on it our entire lives. We are unlikely to have thought about how fundamental listening is to our understanding, explorations, and the ways we interact with our worlds. It is a key source of input to our knowledge and awareness, as well as key to the roles we play in other people’s lives.
Despite all that, our listening capability is surprisingly deficient. We complain about not being heard but, even with good intentions, we are often poor listeners. We also are unlikely to consider the negative impacts of our efforts on the listening of intended recipients.
Life goes on—we depend on communicating, complaining when it doesn’t work adequately, and satisfice. Can SEE (Supportive Environments for Effectiveness) provide insights to help understand and improve the situation?
Listening to Myself
It wasn’t intended to be a small experiment. Pedaling on the stationary bike, Celtic tunes playing to motivate the cycling, seemed like a good time for trying to listen to myself. My low budget “Folding upright bike with pulse” has never been folded up and I don’t care to track my pulse, but I appreciate having the speed, distance, and odometer readings. My focus, however, was on listening and how to rewrite a previous version of this piece.
I kept up the pedaling, but the listening agenda required frequent rekindling! The speed and distance readouts provided uninvited evidence that mind wandering has physiological manifestations. The combination of numbers on the odometer led to amusements about their numeric properties. The time readout made me wonder whether I would meet my undeclared guidelines. My mind wandered in various directions between trips back to the intended topic. Listening to myself turns out to be much like listening to others: intentions are usurped, the mind’s invisible agenda takes precedence.
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The SEE Trio and Listening
Clearly, listening and attention are closely related. Both have several variations, including:
Low-key, low-return listening when we nod and say “aha,” with little attempt to engage; these common occurrences place minimal demand on attention.
“Really” listening, which demands real effort. “Paying” attention provides an apt metaphor as such concerted attention has costs: it dwindles (fatigues) with use, potentially leading to undesirable consequences if not permitted to be replenished.
“Captivating” attention: Consider situations that require no intent but compel our attention, such as a beloved musical piece or bird sounds. Listening in such contexts comes naturally and effortlessly.
In the SEE framework these attention-based variations of listening are related to the Bandwidth category. They differ in the effort they require and, consequently, given that effort is finite, in the need for replenishment or restoration.
Implicit in this discussion is that listening encompasses much more than sound or vocal expression. Listening to ourselves is likely voiceless. Even listening to a speaker incorporates nonverbal qualities that enable interpreting and comprehending the intended message. Put another way, listening entails efforts to make sense, to Understand, which is another of the three core qualities of the SEE framework. Of course, that doesn’t mean that listening assures or even enhances understanding – we have all experienced attentive, active listening that led to enhanced confusion rather than clarity. Listening to the daily news offers ready examples.
The third of the SEE trio, Meaningful Engagement, also bears strong ties to listening. Listening is crucial for conveying trust and respect, providing reassurance, and expressing appreciation – all fundamental features of meaningful engagement. Listening empathetically is foundational to conveying compassion and communicating connection.
Synergy and Mental Models
Just as our bodies need water, proteins, and sleep, each of the SEE trio (Bandwidth, Meaningful engagement, and Understanding) is essential for our effectiveness. It is also true for both these sets that their impacts derive invisibly from their synergy—the ways they function interactively.
Beginning long before we know it, we engage in a continually evolving mega DIY project that is awesome in its capacity and remarkable in its retrieval capabilities. While curiosity occasionally leads us down rabbit holes, much more often, it propels innumerable explorations that become the basis of how we see the world – aka our mental models. Our mental models guide our actions, emotions, and just about everything else. They come with us wherever we go; we couldn’t get to wherever that is, without them.
We are generally oblivious to the attentional costs of our mental activity – exhaustion often sneaks up on us, and we only recognize the tradeoff in hindsight. Our attentional capacity may be depleting, but the sense of making a difference, the excitement of new insights, and the eagerness to continue the exploration override the realization of mental fatigue. Indeed, it’s not unusual that we disregard the realities of mental fatigue. What is often labeled ‘burnout’ may not necessitate dire measures; attending to mental fatigue, however, does call for a dose of the effortless kind of attention.
The SEE Lens
We humans share many characteristics: we are curious creatures, constantly trading information; we do better with a clear head than with confusion and a sense of helplessness; we depend on others, and they depend on us. Despite years of experience with these qualities, we are surprisingly inept at bringing out the best in ourselves and others. The SEE framework doesn’t offer cures or surefire solutions; it does, however, provide some directions and considerations that are broadly adaptable.
Listening is essential for making a difference. It is a vital tool for meaningful engagement which, in turn, enhances understanding through exploration. Exploring leads us to try out solutions to challenges and dilemmas. Even small steps can make big differences. As we try out solutions, our exploration can lead to attentional fatigue, leading to new ways to replenish our attentional resources. And so the exploration cycle goes on!
A word of caution now: While small steps can and do indeed make big differences, they can’t preclude differences that are hateful, harmful, and inhumane. We are living with daily examples of hatred, begetting more hatred, and personal ambitions usurping any sense of moral obligation. It doesn’t take SEE to know that permitting a sense of doom is a sure path to deeper doom. A SEE lens can shine a light on some of the underlying challenges but is ineffectual at solving these intertwined realities.
Small steps are vital for positive differences. Life is comprised of small steps taken individually, and with others, at home, work, and by communities. Small steps are the path to increasing understanding, regaining bandwidth, maintaining civility, and inspiring insightful outcomes.
Take-alongs
Genuine listening is a powerful, life-embracing tool. Its absence undermines civility, meaningfulness, and joy. Genuine listening is also demanding. What it demands is attention—also a powerful, life-embracing tool! Attention is a subtly fragile resource; its decline is unwittingly overlooked as the trigger for irritability and poor judgment.
Alas, there is yet another predicament bearing subtle, invisible, and unintentional ramifications. It concerns the ways each of us impacts other people’s attentional capacity. We like to hold forth, oblivious to whether the intended recipients find the details pertinent, useful, or even understandable. We generate noise that is hard for others to avoid. We dwell in negativity. We emit signals that make it clear that we are not really listening.
Life depends on communicating, but that doesn’t mean we are good at it. A helpful antidote involves looking inward: listening to ourselves, what pulls us down, how do we recalibrate? Being thoughtful about how others feel and asking for feedback are powerful forms of listening. It’s often worth the effort.