In an effort to further integrate the practice of compassion into my professional and personal life, and to sharpen my emotional IQ, I just attended a weekend workshop on Compassionate Listening. You would think someone with a communications degree who spent a year of her recent professional career bringing  the father of compassion (the Dalai Lama) to Seattle would have a good idea what compassionate listening is about. It turns out, I did not. I bring pithy sayings to work like “connect, before you direct” and “watch your emotional wake,” but, in “Hinesight” these statements are trivial compared to what Compassionate Listening is really all about.

I won’t give away their thunder, since Andrea Cohen & Susan Partnow instruct these classes for a living, but here are a few highlights that I appreciated:

1) When we listen, it’s helpful to distinguish between facts, feelings and values. There are  facts to every story, the underlying feelings and underneath that are the values. First we need to listen without judgment. They call this “developing the fair witness.”  When we do this, we can often find a commonality with the speaker, even if we don’t agree with the person’s perspective. When we listen for and identify common values, we can be more empathetic to a person even when we are in conflict. The end result? More connection to the human being and a lesser likelihood that any conflict will escalate.

2) A bit about human needs and conflict: “Conflicts recycle, often in another form, if the basic underlying needs are not addressed.”  “Follow each conflict to its source. The sources of interpersonal conflicts are often unmet inner needs, competition for limited resources, and/or conflicts of values.”  These are two of many basic principles of the Compassionate Listening Project. They remind me of Marshall Rosenberg’s pivotal work in Nonviolent Communication. Let’s face it, we have basic needs. If we aren’t able to identify what we are lacking, we pick fights like little kids even in our workplace to get what we need: love, respect, connection, autonomy, etc. What a world we would have if we could really be honest with ourselves, get underneath the needs we have that aren’t being met BEFORE we act out expecting someone outside of ourselves to know what we need, let alone try to fulfill our needs. On a larger scale, this is how wars start.

3) Respect self and others: I really appreciated the exercises we did in this segment. There’s a habit many of us get into when listening to others; we want to fix their problem. If I’m rescuing someone, I’m basically saying that I don’t respect that she can do it for herself. Oy! This is often called the rescue triangle. As soon as you create this rescue triangle scenario in your head, you are creating a perpetrator, a victim & then you, the ever-ready, caped hero/rescuer. Yuck! I’ve done this. It’s ego-based and there’s no room for it in true compassionate listening where you listen in such a way that the speaker is empowered to solve their own problem.

4) Listen with the heart and speak from the heart. This is where our true compassion lives. If you can’t access compassion, go to gratitude. Gratitude is like kerosene for compassion igniting that fire in our hearts. There’s a whole host of work and research that has been done on the electromagnetic forces of the heart. Check out Heartmath.org.  Believe me, it’s more compelling than being a cerebral listener (yawn), and, by the way, it helps your own human needs get met.

There were many other jewels that I took from the weekend, but those are a few highlights. I encourage you to check out The Compassionate Listening Project. We can ALWAYS learn how to communicate and especially listen with a more trained and compassionate ear.