Active Listening and Fred Rogers

About 15 years ago, the topic of Active Listening was all the rage in corporate training. There was a study at the time that showed that most people practiced what we call “Passive Listening” which means that you are basically just waiting for your turn to speak while the other person is speaking. You avoid interrupting, you politely wait for a long enough pause, and then you unleash your suppressed brilliance in an effusive manner. That’s passive listening: listening for your chance to speak. Passive listening is by nature competitive. You are cooperating with the other person through your patience, but in reality you’re just waiting for your chance to shine.

By contrast, Active Listening was something we were told was practiced in some Asian cultures. Rather than waiting for a pause so you can finally say that witty thing that you thought of, the quick comeback, the mindblowing retort, or one-upping story, you actually listen fully to what they are saying, how they are saying it, and more importantly, how they feel. You try to understand two things fully:

• the content of what they are saying
• how they feel about it

We did an exercise with our team leaders that was designed to improve Active Listening. We called the activity a “Listening Picnic” because it included a brown bag lunch. In the activity, individuals would be given a partner. The first person was asked to tell their assigned partner a story about something that had happened recently, an incident that mattered to them. It could be a positive experience or a frustrating one. It could be work related or personal. What mattered was that it was something that had an impact to them. The partner was tasked with simply listening intently to grasp both the details of the incident (the content) and to understand how the person truly felt about it. After listening, the partner had to in turn tell the story back to the other person, stating it in the first person as if this story was their own, and expressing correctly the emotions the other person had shared. If the first person didn’t agree they felt truly understood, the partner had to try again until true empathy was achieved.

It was a powerful exercise, and several people in the room came away dabbing at their eyes, realizing how the other person felt about something important to them. Even though the story wasn’t important to the partner, this empathetic act created a deeper understanding that we often miss when we are just listening enough to come up with our own response.

I’ve been thinking about this exercise quite a bit lately as our nation continues to become more and move divided based on political partisanship and as passive forms of communication like texting, Facebook, and the internet eliminate the non-verbal cues that can help us understand others’ feelings. There are some topics that are hot button issues, things we find so upsetting that we feel we can’t listen to others talk about them because they are personal to us, and we feel the other person’s disagreement is a threat to our very way of being, our ability to live our lives the way we want them. Listening to why they feel the way they do can be difficult and upsetting when we believe others’ fears or anger have resulted in policies that have harmed us or those we care about or encroached on our own values.

I recently watched the Fred Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor which I blogged about here. One of the things Fred Rogers talked about was listening. He focused his attention in every show on just one child, the idea that he was talking to an individual child when he was talking or singing. He wanted every child to know they were loved just as they were, that each of them was special, and that mistakes are there to learn from. He didn’t mask emotions because he understood that when you hide emotions like fear or anger, you can’t connect with others, and you are saying that you don’t accept them or don’t love them unless they hide those things.

“When we love a person, we accept him or her exactly as is: the lovely with the unlovely, the strong with the fearful, the true mixed in with the facade, and of course, the only way we can do it is by accepting ourselves that way.” Fred Rogers

This kind of listening requires a calm that we don’t often experience in television or even in our daily lives. How often do we just sit and think? Never? In one episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, he placed a turtle on the ground and watched it slowly walk across the floor. In another episode, he suggested they see how long a minute of silence was, then set an egg timer and literally did nothing for a full minute. It was revolutionary! Even when he received an Emmy for his TV program, he stopped and gave room for silent reflection and gratitude inviting the audience:

“So many people have helped me come to this night. Some of you are here. Some are far away. Some are even in heaven. All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, 10 seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are. 10 seconds of silence. I’ll watch the time.” Fred Rogers

It’s hard to imagine that a documentary about this quiet man could be so stirring, but the theater was packed when I went to see it, and the audience was completely engaged. People whispered, gasped, laughed, and more than one cried as we found out more about this man who loved and accepted us as children, who really made us feel as though we mattered and were special.

“Knowing that we can be loved exactly as we are gives us all the best opportunity for growing into the healthiest of people.” Fred Rogers

I was on a long flight recently and watched the movie Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It’s a gritty drama about racism, police brutality, domestic violence, suicide, assault, and maybe a measure of redemption. It’s about as different in tone from the Fred Rogers documentary as you can get. Woody Harrelson plays a small town Sheriff who gives advice to one of his officers, an angry small-minded bigot who antagonizes the family of a victim because she won’t quit hectoring the police department about their failure to find justice for her daughter’s death.

“I think you’ve got the makings of being a really good cop, Jason, and you know why? Because, deep down, you’re a decent man. I know you don’t think I think that, but I do. I do think you’re too angry though, and I know it’s all since your dad died and you had to go look after your mom and all, but as long as you hold on to so much hate, then I don’t think you’re ever going to become, what I know you want to become – a detective. ‘Cause you know what you need to become a detective? And I know you’re gonna wince when I say this, but what you need to become a detective is love. Because through love comes calm, and through calm comes thought. And you need thought to detect stuff sometimes, Jason. It’s kinda all you need. You don’t even need a gun. And you definitely don’t need hate. Hate never solved nothing, but calm did. And thought did. Try it. Try it just for a change. No one’ll think you’re gay. And if they do, arrest ’em for homophobia! Won’t they be surprised! Good luck to you, Jason. You’re a decent man, and yeah you’ve had a run of bad luck, but things are gonna change for you. I can feel it.”

The advice is so unexpected in the context of this verbal assault of a movie that it’s positively breathtaking. The notion that love leads to calm and that calm is the only condition in which listening (and detecting) can happen is worth considering when we are struggling to work together as a country across political lines. Without listening to others, without having that calm and quiet, you will never hear the information that will tell you the truth of situations and people. So the key is love which leads to calm which leads to listening which leads to an accurate view of things.

“If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.” Fred Rogers

When people feel so strongly about things that we aren’t listening to others, or at times even to ourselves, the call for courtesy and politeness isn’t really productive either. It’s at best tone policing the argument, telling people to quiet their emotions so we don’t have to listen with them, acknowledge the hurt and upset, to deal with things. It’s not a solution based on love for self or others; it’s rooted in denial.

Mormons in particular can be averse to the concept of contention which the Book of Mormon in which Jesus says:

“29 For verily, verily I say unto you, he that hath the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another.”

Contention is engaging in a heated disagreement with each party making strong assertions. The opposite of that is not politeness and courtesy and being “agreeable” or nice, pretending that negative things don’t exist, ignoring emotions or tone policing one another into silence. It’s listening to what people actually feel (not just the content of what they are saying) and understanding because we love them. It’s loving ourselves enough to listen to others so that fear and insecurity doesn’t prevent empathy. It’s the calm that comes only when we love ourselves and others enough to listen, when our insecurities don’t let their fears or insecurities enrage us.

Even if we don’t become argumentative, the lack of active listening colors every interaction in which we engage. How often do we read a post cursorily with the intent of cherry-picking a sentiment with which we can strongly agree or disagree in the comments? If we don’t inject moments of silence and quiet reflection into our lives, they won’t happen. If we don’t make the effort to feel what others feel, we will remain forever in a position of protecting our own vulnerabilities and vilifying those who hurt us while they are protecting their own fears.

“When I say it’s you I like, I’m talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.” Fred Rogers

Discuss.