The Resilient Conversationalist: When Active Listening Matters

Even for conversationalists, active listening is rare. Before the question is even out of your mouth, they’ve already jumped to some conclusion and decided to answer that question instead of the one you asked.

The tone of your voice, the look on your face, or the way you enunciate your words can all trigger someone to assume they know where this is going. Maybe they do, and they want to subvert it.

Maybe your name tricked them into treating you like someone else they used to know.  Rarely do you find someone who is so engaged with you as to fully listen.

The need for immediate action and the hollow kind of progress that comes with making a decision quickly turns into an avalanche of unrepairable harm. Tick that box, and get out of the way, because the train is barreling down the tracks.

Making real progress does not include creating more problems, but everything is so hectic these days. We boil our objectives down to daily tasks, and like I was looking for my deer and walked right past it, when we focus on the small things, we think we are doing great, and then never accomplish the big thing. If you think you are killing it on both, then try focusing a little farther out.

I saw in the business world, up close and first hand, how people are able to spin, skirt, and skip the details when it was in their interest to do so. People do it of their own free will, when they have a mortgage to pay, mouths to feed, a reputation to uphold, they do it. They do it in high positions, in low ones, and in departments like the one I used to work in, Quality.

A Competitive Objective

That idea, the one where the entire objective is to win, implies that someone doesn’t. Yet, where can we draw a line between winners and losers? In the air, here losers, you get the smog, and here winners, you can have clean air. The competitive objective will find a way to spend time and money on it, and call me wrong.

You don’t have to have a mother who beat you, siblings who stole from you, and a father who ignored it all to know that it doesn’t feel good, and you don’t have to be an empath to not wish that on anyone.

In reality, you work in insurance and read hundreds of claims that were denied, and what happened to the person who thought they had coverage? When you find out they did, when you find out what management is going to do about it, when you find out you might never get another job, you try to kill yourself. I think the exact thought I had was, “I’d rather die than be a part of this.”

Elsewhere, in other situations, I just got another job. As fast as I could. Out of the frying pan, and into the fire.

In hindsight, I should have stayed where I started. Warned that I would have to surrender my life’s direction, I ran away with the fear of what that might bring.

Finally, I was able to retire at 47. Phew, I made it, if there were a few close calls. From toxic environments created by bully bosses and work-shy colleagues to toxic agendas driven by executives with scores to settle, earning a buck required all the skills I learned in a childhood that earned me an ACE score of 8.

With that final surrender, life got good.

Wanting to Win

Active listening starts with wanting to hear and defining a win as a long-term collaborative one that is best for everyone.

My dad told me a story of something I didn’t remember from grade six. It was my turn to decide where to assign each player for the softball game this week. Historically, as in every single week, whoever got the choices favored their friends and put their enemies on the bench. He asked if that was my plan, and I said that I wanted to win. It was a win defined in the collective, not individual.

It’s more likely that I didn’t have any friends, and therefore, everyone was just as guilty or just as innocent in their treatment of me. I had come to the four-room school from a larger, better-equipped one, and gym class turned into a bus ride to another school instead of the climbing wall and fully equipped gymnasium I’d come from. They’d been in one class, one school, for their whole lives, and I was an outsider.

Moreover, I was shutting it down. Yes, I pleaded with my dad to get me out of that school, or close it down. It took two years, and by that time, I was in my final year at it, this year, when I was deciding baseball positions.

Ultimately, it made no positive difference in my life, only negative.

Too late, yet, everyone knows, so now they know who ruined their lives: me, and my thirst, at the time, for gymnastics, French, and Science. By the time these three were finally reintroduced in my life, all I wanted was the privacy and security of my own bedroom.

Boy, how we just keep lowering our standards, don’t we? I’m sure I can’t be the only one.

The Absolute Truth

When you finally meet someone who practices active listening, you hold on to that person. They are an actual mirror, and it will throw you off.

I watch his lips move as he mouths the words as I am saying them. I don’t know why there is no lag, but he is actually mouthing my words, as if he’s reading my mind in real time. It’s so odd; I have to look away, for I will forget what I am saying.

I haven’t met anyone else like this. Even during the time in my career when I was called a trainer, and I had a so-called classroom, and all that formal stuff, they actively did not listen. One guy even put his head on the desk and slept through the whole thing. It was humiliating, and he called himself my friend.

I had put a lot of effort into making sure I was serving them as best I could, and this guy wasn’t putting an ounce of effort into reciprocating.

I don’t take it personally, though. Everyone is a rebel. No one wants to be told what to do.

With active listening, one interview subject responded when I said that. She said, “Yes, some people do. Those people who do not want accountability, those who want to throw up their hands and say, ‘I was just doing what I was told.’”

I wanted to hire this gifted conversationalist immediately. When she said that, I knew it was the absolute truth. It was why everything breaks the second that it’s okay when we’re talking about adults, and frankly, I’m suspicious of accepting a world in which it’s even okay for a kid to say that.

Good God, He gave you a brain. Shall we not we use it?

We all learn the hard way that someone bigger, stronger, richer, or older can tell me what to do, but someone smaller, weaker, poorer, or younger cannot. Violate that rule at your own risk, and follow it with prudence, because one day, everyone is older, smarter, stronger, and richer.

At work, it’s easy to violate that rule. Sooner or later, you will report to someone who violates the rules you have regarding who you must obey and when you can exercise your own will.

When you have to suck it up in one relationship, you let it loose in a different relationship, one where you are higher on the chain. It’s not fair, and it’s not right, but there’s a cartoon about the boss yelling at the husband, who goes home and yells at the wife, who then scolds the child, who kicks the dog, who bites the cat…anyway, I’m sure you can see where this is going.

The end of violence means, at the very least, not passing it on.

I’m no saint. I don’t suck up my anger. I direct it at the person who caused it. In a very specific and precise, equal and opposite kind of way. I’m glue and what you tried to bounce off of me is coming straight back at you.

I might look little, but this is my power.

Unlike my family members, who chose to get fat and never be the smallest target in the room, they won’t lose weight until they realize what problem is being solved by the current condition. You aren’t going to lose weight until you stop biting your tongue and swallowing your words.

I chose to pack my bag and move out at eight, and my mom said, “Let me help you!”

Taking Precious Time

I believe no one should ever be allowed to dominate. You might be above me in the hierarchy, but you have a job to do, and I have a different one. Yours is not to tell me what to do; if I were that incompetent, you should have hired someone else.

When you get hired because you have a massive list of certifications, and then your boss is telling you what to type into your Excel spreadsheet, you wonder if it would have been more financially astute for the company to send this broad on an Excel course than to pay you to do her typing. Yet it wasn’t the last time I was paid to do the typing.

One manager completed my HR form about where I wanted to be in five years on my behalf. Forget active listening; she never asked me a single question. Another manager spent all morning searching online for recipes for me to make and take to the optional company potluck; forget active listening and my lack of intention to attend.

From small details to major moves, I’ve had parents, managers, and anyone who thought they might get away with it, trying to steer my life for me. I know why they think they will get away with it, but it never works out the way anyone would have wanted.

I’m a dragon on the inside. I’m not changing my exterior so that you realize not to mess with me, so just don’t mess with me. Or anyone.

Among the people who called themselves my friends were people constantly telling me what to do. If I didn’t take their advice, they’d buy me a present to reinforce their point, like signing me up for a course in which I had no interest.

Personal Sacrifices

Some conversationalists were always starting every sentence with, “You should…” as if I didn’t have ideas, opinions, interests, and direction of my own. I did not make the mistake of calling those people my friends, no matter how they thought of themselves. Active listening reveals the control and domination that will follow.

As a management consultant, I had a firm belief in this team principle: everyone plays a different role, and they are all equally important and dependent yet separate. Our own little sandboxes, all stacked together. Not on top of each other. I gave speeches and did presentations, and everyone clapped, yet nothing ever changed.

When I hit the public circuit with my show, the response was even more dismal. Finally, I realized that everyone is chasing that control. I can’t change the game when they’ve almost won it. With my next promotion, I’ll get to do it my way, you just see. When I get elected prime minister, I won’t be beholden, you just see. When I am CEO, everyone will do what I say, and it will finally be my way.

Guess what, no, it won’t. But let me know if your experience is different. In this case, we only need one data point, and I certainly don’t know every individual in the world. I read that Ray Dalio might have nailed it, and that could be The One, the exception that makes the rule?

We all make sacrifices to keep people in our lives. The question is, how far do you want to go, and for whom? More importantly, would they rather that you didn’t? Instead of trying to control other people, start by knowing how to control yourself. Active listening means tuning into your inner voice of truth.

Getting it Done

When I was growing up, I was under the impression that everything was done. In science, you learn this is what we used to think, then this happened, and we changed it to this. Nowhere do I remember ever learning the debates and doubts, the leaps of assumption, and the still unanswered questions.

Today, as an adult, I know how embarrassing that might be, not having an adequate answer for a kid, and realizing that it was fine with you, so the problem is clearly the kid. I know that some might have thought all the ambiguity might be scary to a little kid, so better to make-believe that everything is concrete and ironclad. In reality, I remember thinking, “Then what is left to do? What is left for me to do?”

You might know discipline, how to force yourself to do something you don’t want to do. You might know obedience, doing what you been told to do. Maybe you know servitude, doing what you don’t want to do, but for the specific benefit of that other person.

You know control, when you know which one you are doing, and when you are doing something because you know in your heart that it’s what you were born to do, why your soul is here. You can be so busy that you don’t have any time left for that most important task – the one no one can do for you. What you can’t do is force someone else to do work for you. You can’t hire your way out of it, and you can’t outsource it.

You do you, and I’ll do me. Don’t piss in my sandbox or “should” all over me, I’m busy building castles in the sky.

I disliked piano lessons. There was a child prodigy on the newspaper’s cover, sitting at a grand piano. I was older than this boy, and I was just starting to learn. Immediately, I knew that the piano was not where I was supposed to be spending my time.

Yet, a parent decides what their child will do and not do, don’t they? I remember watching Charlotte Church singing on television with my dad. He was raptured by her talent and admired her out loud. I said, “Good thing she wasn’t born into this family, or no one would have ever known that she could sing.” He laughed. It wasn’t a joke.

Shackled into piano lessons, I wanted out badly. I was swinging on the set at school, awaiting the appointed hour, lesson book leaning against the steel pole of the apparatus. I swung higher and higher, thinking only about how I never wanted to touch a piano again. Ever again. Ever again.

Suddenly, a wind picked up, a whirlwind, and my book was whisked away. I couldn’t find it. I ran for help, but no one found it.

Just like that, I couldn’t follow along with the class, and there were no replacement books, so just like that, I never had to touch a piano again. Thanks, universe! The things we must do to escape the clutches of other people, Geesh. For all my desire to be the recipient of active listening, it was the universe that seemed to be the only audience willing to respond. Active listening might be so superhuman as to be something next to Godliness, should you be a willing conversationalist.