ACTIVE LISTENING
by Carl R. Rogers and Richard E. Farson
Excerpt from Communicating in Business Today
R.G. Newman, M.A. Danzinger, M. Cohen (eds)
D.C. Heath & Company, 1987
Active listening does not
necessarily mean long sessions spent listening to
grievances, personal or
otherwise. It is simply a way of approaching those
problems which arise out of the usual day-to-day
events of any job.
To be effective, active listening
must be firmly grounded in the basic attitudes of the
user. We cannot
employ it as a technique if our fundamental attitudes are
in conflict with its basic concepts. If we try, our
behavior will be empty and sterile, and our associates
will be quick to recognize this. Until we can
demonstrate a spirit which genuinely respects the
potential worth of the individual, which considers his
sights and trusts his capacity for sell-direction, we
cannot begin to be effective listeners.
What We Achieve by Listening
Active listening is an important
way to bring about changes in people. Despite the popular
notion that
listening is a passive approach, clinical and research
evidence clearly shows that sensitive listening is a
most effective agent for individual personality change
and group development. Listening brings about
changes in peoples attitudes toward themselves and
others; it also brings about changes in their basic
values and personal philosophy. People who have been
listened to in this new and special way become
more emotionally mature, more open to their experiences,
less defensive, more democratic, and less
authoritarian.
When people are listened to
sensitively, they tend to listen to themselves with more
care and to make
clear exactly what they are feeling and thinking. Group
members tend to listen more to each other, to
become less argumentative, more ready to incorporate
other points of view. Because listening reduces
the threat of having one’s ideas criticized, the
person is better able to see them for what they are and
is
more likely to feel that his contributions are
worthwhile.
Not the least important result of listening is the change
that takes place within the listener himself.
Besides providing more information than any other
activity, listening builds deep, positive relationships
and tends to alter constructively the attitudes of the
listener. Listening is a growth experience.
These, then, are some of the worthwhile results we can
expect from active listening. But how do we go
about this kind of listening? How do we become active
listeners?
How to Listen
Active listening aims to bring
about changes in people. To achieve this end, it relies
upon definite
techniques—things to do and things to avoid doing.
Before discussing these techniques, however, we
should first understand why they are effective. To do so,
we must understand how the individual
personality develops.
The Growth of the Individual
Through all of our lives, from
early childhood on, we have learned to think of ourselves
in certain very
definite ways. We have built up pictures of ourselves.
Sometimes these self-pictures are pretty realistic,
but at other times they are not. For example, an overage,
overweight lady may fancy herself a youthful,
ravishing siren, or an awkward teen-ager regard himself
as a star athlete. All of us have experiences
which fit the way we need to think about ourselves. These
we accept. But it is much harder to accept
experiences which don’t fit. And sometimes if it is
very important for us to hang on to this self-picture, we
don’t accept or admit these experiences at all.
These self-pictures are not
necessarily attractive. A man, for example, may regard
himself as
incompetent and worthless. He may feel that he is doing
his job poorly in spite of favorable appraisals by
the company. As long as he has these feelings about
himself, he must deny any experiences which would
seem not to fit this self-picture—in this case any
that might indicate to him that he is competent. It is so
necessary for him to maintain this self-picture that he
is threatened by anything which would tend to
change it. Thus, when the company raises his salary, it
may seem to him only additional proof that he is
a fraud. He must hold onto this self-picture, because,
bad or good, it’s the only thing he has by which he
can identify himself.
This is why direct attempts to
change this individual or change his self-picture are
particularly
threatening. He is forced to defend himself or to
completely deny the experience. This denial of
experience and defense of the self-picture tend to bring
on rigidity of behavior and create difficulties in
personal adjustment.
The active-listening approach, on
the other hand, does not present a threat to the
individual’s selfpicture.
He does not have to defend it. He is able to explore it,
see it for what it is, and make his own
decision about how realistic it is. And he is then in a
position to change.
If I want to help a man reduce his
defensiveness and become more adaptive, I must try to
remove the
threat of myself as his potential changer. As long as the
atmosphere is threatening, there can be no
effective communication. So I must create a climate which
is neither critical, evaluative, nor moralizing. It
must be an atmosphere of equality and freedom,
permissiveness and understanding, acceptance and
warmth. It is in this climate and this climate only that
the individual feels safe enough to incorporate new
experiences and new values into his concept of himself.
Let’s see how active listening helps to create this
climate.
What to Avoid
When we encounter a person with a
problem our usual response is to try to change his way of
looking at
things—to get him to see his situation the way we
see it or would like him to see it. We plead, reason,
scold, encourage, insult, prod—anything to bring
about a change in the desired direction, that is, in the
direction we want him to travel. What we seldom realize,
however, is that, under these circumstances,
we are usually responding to our own needs to see the
world in certain ways. It is always difficult for us
to tolerate and understand actions which are different
from the ways in which we believe we should act.
If, however, we can free ourselves from the need to
influence and direct others in our own paths, we
enable ourselves to listen with understanding and thereby
employ the most potent available agent of
change.
One problem the listener faces is
that of responding to demands for decisions, judgments,
and
evaluations. He is constantly called upon to agree or
disagree with someone or something. Yet, as he
well knows, the question or challenge frequently is a
masked expression of feelings or needs which the
speaker is far more anxious to communicate than he is to
have the surface questions answered. Because
he cannot speak these feelings openly, the speaker must
disguise them to himself and to others in an
acceptable form.
Passing judgment, whether critical
or favorable, makes free expression difficult. Similarly,
advice and
information are almost always seen as efforts to change a
person and thus serve as barriers to his self-expression
and the development of a creative relationship. Moreover,
advice is seldom taken, and
information hardly ever utilized. The eager young trainee
probably will not become patient just because
he is advised that “the road to success in business
is a long, difficult one, and you must be patient.”
And
it is no more helpful for him to learn that “only
one out of a hundred trainees reaches a top management
position." Interestingly, it is a difficult lesson
to learn that positive evaluations are sometimes as
blocking
as negative ones. It is almost as destructive to the
freedom of a relationship to tell a person that he is
good or capable or right, as to tell him otherwise. To
evaluate him positively may make it more difficult
for him to tell of the faults that distress him or the
ways in which he believes he is not competent.
Encouragement also may be seen as
an attempt to motivate the speaker in certain directions
or hold him
off, rather than as support. “I’m sure
everything will work out O.K.” is not a helpful
response to the
person who is deeply discouraged about a problem. In
other words, most of the techniques and devices
common to human relationships are found to be of little
use in establishing the type of relationship we
are seeking here.
What to Do
Just what does active listening
entail, then? Basically, it requires that we get inside
the speaker, that we
grasp, from his point of view, just what it is he is
communicating to us. More than that, we must convey
to the speaker that we are seeing things from his point
of view. To listen actively, then, means that there
are several things we must do.
Listen for Total Meaning.
Any message a person tries to get
across usually has two components: the
content of the message and the feeling or attitude
underlying this content. Both are important; both give
the message meaning. It is this total meaning of the
message that we try to understand. For example, a
machinist comes to his foreman and says, “I’ve
finished that lathe setup.” This message has obvious
content and perhaps calls upon the foreman for another
work assignment, Suppose, on the other hand,
that he says, “Well, I’m finally finished with
that damned lathe setup.” The content is the same,
but the
total meaning of the message has changed - and changed in
an important way for both the foreman and
the worker. Here sensitive listening can facilitate the
relationship. Suppose the foreman were to respond
by simply giving another work assignment. Would the
employee feel that he had gotten his total message
across? Would he feel free to talk to his foreman? Will
he feel better about his job, more anxious to do
good work on the next assignment?
Now, on the other hand, suppose the
foreman were to respond with, “Glad to have it over
with, huh?” or
“Had a pretty rough time of it?” or "I
guess you don’t feel like doing anything like that
again,” or anything
else that tells the worker that he heard and understands.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that the next work
assignment need be changed or that he must spend an hour
listening to the worker complain about the
setup problems he encountered. He may - do a number of
things differently in the light of the new
information he has from the workerbut not necessarily.
It’s just that extra sensitivity on the part of the
foreman which can transform an average working climate
into a good one.
Respond to Feelings.
In some instances, the content is
far less important than the feeling which underlies
it. To catch the full flavor or meaning of the message,
one must respond particularly to the feeling
component. If, for instance, our machinist had said,
“I’d like to melt this lathe down and make
paper clips
out of it,” responding to content would be obviously
absurd. But to respond to his disgust or anger in
trying to work with his lathe recognizes the meaning of
this message. There are various shadings of
these components in the meaning of any message. Each
time, the listener must try to remain sensitive to
the total meaning the message has to the speaker. What is
he trying to tell me? What does this mean to
him? How does he see this situation?
Note All Cues.
Not all communication is verbal.
The speaker’s words alone don’t tell us
everything he is
communicating. And hence, truly sensitive listening
requires that we become aware of several kinds of
communication besides verbal. The way in which a speaker
hesitates in his speech can tell us much about
his feelings. So, too, can the inflection of his voice.
He may stress certain points loudly and clearly and
may mumble others. We should also note such things as the
person’s facial expressions, body posture,
hand movements, eye movements, and breathing. All of
these help to convey his total message.
What We Communicate by Listening
The first reaction of most people
when they consider listening as a possible method for
dealing with
human beings is that listening cannot be sufficient in
itself. Because it is passive, they feel, listening does
not communicate anything to the speaker. Actually,
nothing could be farther from the truth.
By consistently listening to a speaker, you are conveying
the idea that: “I’m interested in you as a
person, and I think that what you feel is important. I
respect your thoughts, and even if I don’t agree
with them, I know that they are valid for you. I feel
sure that you have a contribution to make. I’m not
trying to change you or evaluate you. I just want to
understand you. I think you’re worth listening to,
and I want you to know that I’m the kind of a person
you can talk to.”
The subtle but more important
aspect of this is that it is the demonstration of the
message that works.
While it is most difficult to convince someone that you
respect him by telling him so, you are much more
likely to get this message across by really behaving that
way—by actually having and demonstrating
respect for this person. Listening does this most
effectively.
Like other behavior, listening
behavior is contagious. This has implications for all
communication
problems, whether between two people or within a large
organization. To ensure good communication
between associates up and down the line, one must first
take the responsibility for setting a pattern of
listening. Just as one learns that anger is usually met
with anger, argument with argument, and
deception with deception, one can learn that listening
can be met with listening. Every person who feels
responsibility in a situation can set the tone of the
interaction, and the important lesson in this is that any
behavior exhibited by one person will eventually be
responded to with similar behavior in the other
person
It is far more difficult to
stimulate constructive behavior in another person but far
more profitable.
Listening is one of these constructive behaviors, but if
one’s attitude is to “wait out” the
speaker rather
than really listen to him, it will fail. The one who
consistently listens with understanding, however, is the
one who eventually is most likely to be listened to. If
you really want to be heard and understood by
another, you can develop him as a potential listener,
ready for new ideas, provided you can first develop
yourself in these ways and sincerely listen with
understanding and respect.
Because understanding another
person is actually far more difficult than it at first
seems, it is important
to test constantly your ability to see the world in the
way the speaker sees it. You can do this by
reflecting in your own words what the speaker seems to
mean by his words and actions. His response to
this will tell you whether or not he feels understood. A
good rule of thumb is to assume that you never
really understand until you can communicate this
understanding to the others satisfaction.
Here is an experiment to test your
skill in listening. The next time you become involved in
a lively or
controversial discussion with another person, stop for a
moment and suggest that you adopt this ground
rule for continued discussion:
Before either participant in the
discussion can make a point or express an opinion of his
own, he must
first restate aloud the previous point or position of the
other person. This restatement must be in his own
words (merely parroting the words of another does not
prove that one has understood, but only that he
has heard the words). The restatement must be accurate
enough to satisfy the speaker before the
listener can be allowed to speak for himself.
This is something you could try in
your own discussion group. Have someone express himself
on some
topic of emotional concern to the group. Then, before
another member expresses his own feelings and
thought, he must rephrase the meaning expressed by the
previous speaker to that individual’s
satisfaction. Note the changes in the emotional climate
and in the quality of the discussion when you try
this.
Problems in Active Listening
Active listening is not an easy
skill to acquire. It demands practice. Perhaps more
important, it may
require changes in our own basic attitudes. These changes
come slowly and sometimes with considerable
difficulty. Let us look at some of the major problems in
active listening and what can be done to
overcome them.
To be effective at all in active
listening, one must have a sincere interest in the
speaker. We all live in
glass houses as far as our attitudes are concerned. They
always show through. And if we are only making
a pretense of interest in the speaker. he will quickly
pick this up, either consciously or unconsciously. And
once he does, he will no longer express himself freely.
Active listening carries a strong
element of personal risk. If we manage to accomplish what
we are
describing here — to sense deeply the feeling of
another person, to understand the meaning his
experiences have for him, to see the world as he sees it
— we risk being changed ourselves… To get the
meaning which life has for him — we risk coming to
see the world as he sees it. It is threatening to give
up, even momentarily, what we believe and start thinking
in someone else’s terms. It takes a great deal
of inner security and courage to be able to risk
one’s self in understanding another.
We are so accustomed to viewing
ourselves in certain ways — to seeing and hearing
only what we want to
see and hear — that it is extremely difficult for a
person to free himself from his needs to see things these
ways. To do this may sometimes be unpleasant, but it is
far more difficult than unpleasant.
Developing an attitude of sincere
interest in the speaker is thus no easy task. It can be
developed only by
being willing to risk seeing the world from the
speaker’s point of view. If we have a number of such
experiences, however, they will shape an attitude which
will allow us to be truly genuine in our interest in
the speaker.
Carl R. Rogers & Richard E.
Farson
excerpt from ACTIVE LISTENING
Communicating in Business Today
R.G. Newman, M.A. Danzinger, M. Cohen (eds)
D.C. Heath & Company, 1987
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