#319: A Recollection of Deep Listening
A Recollection of Deep Listening
After recently reading two pieces on deep listening written by someone in the community, I noticed a key theme in both: "Listening for what is being communicated but isn't being said." Then I thought more about what it looks like when I've felt someone do this well in my own life.
It took me back to a moment this summer, when I sat across the dinner table from a person I had only recently met. As we sipped our drinks waiting for the food to arrive, I started casually talking about work from the last week and some projects I’d been focusing on. But it took me by surprise when he looked me in the eyes, changed the topic and said, “So I just wanted to check in with you. When we had been messaging last week, I sensed something was bothering you, but I knew you weren’t ready to talk about it. I wanted to see if you were still in that headspace or if whatever it was wasn’t bleeding into this week. Did you want to talk about it?”
Hearing him say this directly yet gently seemed to pause time for a brief moment. There was something I had been struggling with the past week. And he was right in giving me the time and space by NOT looking into it in the early stages. Instead, he waited a few days for the proper environment to ask about it again. He was also right in the sense that now I was ready to share and open up. And about five minutes later, after I revealed it, he somehow knew it was not advice or another opinion I was looking for. Instead, he simply remained silent as I spoke, never broke eye contact, and when I was done, he stated what he admired about me given the challenge I was facing. That was it. No further questions or advice-giving.
I ended up seeing this person sitting across from me in a new light. I felt like I knew him, and he knew me, even though that wasn't necessarily the case. It was all simply because of his ability to listen and hear what I was feeling without me having to verbalize it. But even more so, not only did he recognize what I was feeling on my end, but he figured out what I was needing from his end.
Maybe it was his perfect intuitive response to my narrative, but I realized on the drive home that night that perhaps humans do not even need to know one another super well. Even if with a stranger, people have this remarkable capacity to sense a need in another person and determine how to approach them. Maybe it's a shift in energy that takes place, or something said nonverbally on one side of the conversation. I don't know. Whatever it is though, I will never forget this listener's presence and patience that day and the deeper connection that inevitably grew as a result of it.