In the video “The Art of Listening” while responding to the question “How does listening help us embrace different perspectives?” Simon Sinek says that listening is not the act of hearing the words spoken, it is the art of understanding the meaning behind those words. Art of listening is creating an environment in which the other person feels heard, feels seen and feels understood. It is a learnable practicable skill and there are many parts of it, it’s like replacing judgement with curiosity, it's like creating a safe space for someone to empty the bucket even if we find what the other person is saying as just reprehensible. You're never going to be able to have dialogue until one of the parties gets the opportunity to say everything without judgment. Once a person feels like they've completely said everything, then they're more apt to listen to you but usually what we do is we defend or we litigate or we interrupt, we point out flaws in logic which is just frustrating. There are really easy ways to make someone feel heard like saying “Go on, tell me more, what else”. When they find this space, they keep talking, you go quiet and they fill the space and eventually, it’s all out and then there's a safe space for you to respond and express yourself in a constructive way. Unfortunately, we do not teach listening and listening is the way to build trust with someone and to find common ground in opposition. William Yuri wrote “Getting to yes” in which he says that we have talk shows but we don't have listen shows, we have peace talks but what we really need is peace listens. At the highest level of peace negotiations, people show up and start demanding what they want and that's how the negotiations begin, nobody starts by saying “Tell me why you came here”.
There is a great documentary “White right: Meeting the enemy” by Dia Khan. Dia is a Muslim woman living in the UK and she was trolled by white supremacists to the point that the police got involved because her life was at risk. They told her to stay away from open windows, that's how bad it got. The way Dia responded was by moving to the United States and meeting the white supremacists. She brought her cameras to document this and she gave them a safe space to feel heard, she lets them empty their bucket and then the conversation begins and because they feel heard, they start to trust her. It created this paradox where white supremacists are supposed to hate this woman but they started trusting her and one by one these white supremacists start dropping out of the movement because they can no longer reconcile their beliefs with reality. If it can happen in this extreme environment, then it can happen anywhere. All that is required for us is to cross political divides or disagreements at work, one of the parties has to learn how to listen, it doesn't even require both parties to learn the skill and that's the amazing thing. The power of listening is one of the most remarkable skills that anyone can learn and the documentary is a great extreme example of what it can do.
