Deutschtrance: Are You 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 pretence of interest in the speaker, he will quickly pick this up, either consciously or unconsciously. And once he does, he will no longer ex-press 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 under-stand 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.”

Rogers, Carl Ransom; Farson, Richard E.(2006). Active Listening. Excerpt from 1957 article, Chicago (University of Chicago Industrial Relations Center) (25 pp.). Also in: Newman, R. G. / Danziger, M. A. / Cohen, M. (Eds.). Communication in Business Today.  Washington C.C. (Heath and Company) 1987