conversation is an engine

Exercise this underused relational tool

How could listening ever be bad or wrong? For a long time I thought of listening as a sign of weakness: if you are listening, you must not know something. Or maybe you don’t have your ideology straight. If you are listening than you are not talking. And leaders talk: they present solutions. They know stuff and they say it like a champion news reader. Leaders gather followers by releasing streams of words.

It turns out listening is an incredibly rich relational tool: it lets us hear another’s voice. Listening moves a thought from one brain to another. It pulls an experience from one set of muscles to another. Even if we seem to be hearing all the same old words, relational work is accomplished between two talkers when there is also hearing: someone is less alone.

Maybe we don’t listen because we already know what this person will say. But what if we focused on becoming the kind of people others could explore ideas with?

I like those conversations best: where we step outside of ideology and ask “What if?”

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Image credit: Jacob Etter