THE ART OF REAL LISTENING

Four days into ACMC again and the realization is beginning to really dawn on people— real listening is hard work. It’s not easy. It requires a lot of effort. It requires a lot of personal preparation— mostly and centrally it involves releasing preoccupying thoughts, evaluations, judgments, etc. This happened last week in Mexico and it is repeating this week here in Hong Kong. Nor is it a matter of intelligence. Here in Hong Kong we have two medical doctors and nine psychiatric nurses. Intelligence isn’t the problem or the solution. So what is?

Truly listening to a person requires several things. It requires the ability to give one’s presence to another person, to enter into that person’s world and entertain what that world must look like from that person’s perspective. We call that “taking second perceptual position” in NLP. And while a person could do that superficially, to do it authentically one must be secure enough in oneself to let one of one’s own world and perspective and try on another’s. In other words, it takes a lot of ego-strength and self- esteem to deeply listen to another person.