“Listening is an activity. It's not passive. We are creating the world by listening all the time.” – Julian Treasure
It is a busy, noisy world – within and without. Searching for clarity, focus and answers in circumstances, other people and “someday” destinations, we come up empty again and again, pivoting to the next scheme, shortcut or workaround with a continued external focus.
By adding more to the overflowing piles of starts and stops, we blur and block any chance for clarity of thought and simplicity of direction, our true north. The answers and insights that we seek externally are actually rooted within, in our own intuition, dreams and inklings.
Pause daily, take inventory and create order from what already exists. Start from where you are right now and move forward, a step at a time. Ask questions and wait quietly and openly for answers to enter. Invite them in, seek understanding through inquiry.
The concept of appreciative inquiry was developed by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastav in the early 1990’s. The five original principles include:
Constructionist: WORDS CREATE WORLDS
Simultaneity: INQUIRY CREATES CHANGE
Poetic: WE CAN CHOOSE WHAT WE STUDY
Anticipatory: IMAGE INSPIRES ACTION
Positive: POSITIVE QUESTIONS LEAD TO POSITIVE CHANGE
Through the years, additional principles have emerged including:
Wholeness: WHOLENESS BRINGS OUT THE BEST
Enactment: ACTING ‘AS IF” IS SELF-FULFILLING
Free choice: FREE CHOICE LIBERATES POWER
Narrative: STORIES ARE TRANSFORMATIVE
Awareness: BE CONSCIOUS OF UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS
By employing appreciate inquiry principles along with active listening, the right actions become apparent and clarity unfolds naturally. Clarity coming from asking and action, from finding out what works and what doesn’t work through implementation and execution.
Birgit Ohlin, MA, BBA, Coach offers six tips for active listening that are valuable to listening to others as well as yourself:
Nonverbal involvement – eye contact, nodding head;
Pay attention to the speaker, not your own thoughts;
Practice Non-Judgment;
Tolerate silence;
Paraphrase;
Ask questions
Julian Treasure’s 5 Ways to Listen Better Ted Talk offers simple exercises to improve conscious listening by paying attention to the quiet, the subtle and understated to access understanding:
Silence - just three minutes a day is a wonderful exercise to reset your ears and to recalibrate, so that you can hear the quiet again;
"The mixer” - listen to how many individual channels of sound can that you can hear. It's a improves the quality of your listening;
Savoring – enjoy mundane sounds and find the "hidden choir" that’s around us all the time.
Listening position – play with filters as levers to get conscious. Filters include active/passive; reductive/expansive; critical/empathetic;
RASA – receive, appreciate, summarize and ask
Weave quiet into each day, ask questions to foster clarity and insight to inform meaningful action that creates progress.
“When you quiet your mind, you can enter a world of clarity, peace and understanding.” – Alice Coltrane