Parents on the Same Page,

The Power of Listening
David Cunningham, a leading expert on preventing child abuse and an instructor for Landmark Education, a personal development seminar company, recently gave a radio interview on effective communication within families. Here are some of the questions from that interview.
Interviewer: David, you’ve talked about listening being the first of key components for effective communication in families, and you said listening was as important as speaking in a family setting. Actually you said it was more important. And I heard about a listening exercise people experienced in the coursework that you teach. Can you tell us how that exercise helps families learn to communicate effectively?
David Cunningham: One exercise we do is we have people talk and we have the other person purposely not listen. And only for a minute, literally one minute. Do you know what happens in that minute? It’s amazing. If I’m talking to you and you’re not listening, and in this exercise we have them do it on purpose, don’t listen, we say. Clean your pocket book, file your nails, talk to somebody else but while this person is talking to you, don’t listen to them.
People actually do have fun with it and it’s amazing. If you do that for just one minute the person that’s talking literally starts to stutter and stammer. The person that’s talking will literally lose interest in what they’re saying. And we tell them, talk about something that really matters to you. Talk about something you’re really interested in. Talk about something you’re excited about. Within the first minute of not being listened to, they’ll lose their own passion. And in that first minute when the person’s not being listened to, a lot of people will literally either go silent, just stop, or they’ll start talking about something silly, like something they don’t really care about. And even though they know it’s an exercise, even though they know the other person was told ‘don’t listen’, what happens in just a minute of not being listened to is they have the experience of being either hurt, disappointed, angry, disconnected. And that’s just in one minute.
So then we flip it over and we say, “Okay good. Talk again for a minute and this time the other person really listen and give them your undivided attention.” And, Charlene, in that next minute the most amazing thing happens.
First off, they find out they had more to say than they thought they had to say. Second, their own passion for what they’re talking about grows. Third, they have a deep experience of appreciation for the person listening to. So, what you learn quickly and what families can learn right away out of an exercise like that is if you want somebody around you that’s alive and passionate, then all you have to do is listen to them. If you want somebody around you that’s brilliant--good, listen to them. If you want somebody around you that appreciates you being there, listen to them. I think we can all reflect in our lives and see we have people in our lives who are quiet and we end up thinking that they don’t have anything to say. Or we have people in our lives that never talk about anything that we consider important and we think, well it’s because they don’t have anything important to talk about. Or we have people in our lives that repeat themselves or people in our lives that are angry with us and what we never noticed is that that is often and foremost a result of simply they didn’t get listened to. And if they just get listened to, sometimes just for a few minutes, it makes all the difference in the world.
Interviewer: Yeah, that’s kind of sad to think that some people go unlistened to for quite some time.
David Cunningham: It is, right? I think if we look around the world, Charlene, I think you see a lot of that quite frankly. If you go to a staff meeting and somebody in your staff meeting is really listening the other people start generating ideas that they wouldn’t have generated if nobody’s listening. Same thing happens at home; if somebody’s really listening, people start generating ideas they didn’t even think of generating before.
Interviewer: Right, and then they feel safe to share.
David Cunningham: That’s right, because everything is listened to as a possible valid idea. So it becomes a safe place to share. And then when that happens, people really are connected. It leaves people connected and creative. If you can have a family where people are connected and creative, you really are going to have a family you love. That’s exactly what we’re committed to out of our programs at Landmark Education.

Article Source: http://www.alltopinfo.com

John is author of article written on Landmark Education Review & Landmark Forum Review. For more information, please visit :www.landmarkeducationnews.info

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