Things done habitually fade into a kind of white noise background that I cease being aware of; unless something unusual alerts me and/or I place attention on it. Included in this are the habits of listening acquired over time. I have learned to check in with myself after a conversation goes south, meaning I became defensive, offensive and/or both. I have discovered three common ways I listen that take me where I don’t want to go:
1. I listen to see whether I agreed or not.
2. I listen to see if they thought I was at fault
for something.
3. I listen to be right.
It was all about me when that happened. This way of listening is definitely my default setting when my attention is elsewhere. No matter what kind of defense I used it rarely made anything better. It did not produce what I wanted.
I learned to listen for what they were feeling, were the angry, hurt, felt demeaned by some way I had acted? Had I meant to have them feel the way they did? These were different ways to relate to an old problem. If I didn’t want the result I had to try new things. I saw their responses as a combination of what I put out and how they were wired. When I stopped justifying, I caught glimpses of what they had witnessed. I could see how I came off to them. Many times it was unpleasant to look at.
Early in working with this it all happened after the fact. The incident would occur, the reaction would take place and I would blame myself for not knowing how to stop it. Now I’m not so afraid to discover where I have been a bulldozer or a jerk. I’m not so invested in keeping those behaviors any more.
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