Linda Olsen, A beginning listening/focusing group

Linda Olsen, A beginning listening/focusing group

The following is a suggested structure for teaching and learning listening and focusing in an on-going group. The model was developed through experimenting with teaching listening on Sunday nights at Changes, and it has also been tried in a number of other situations. It works best with about six people and the first session takes about 2. 5 hours, depending on how nervous people are and how good the leader is at moving things along. More than eight people is usually too many because the last ones to get a turn can get tired, bored, or impatient.

First Session: Introduction to Listening/Focusing

Part of what the leader does in the first session is to create a sense of what the group will be working on. People will have various ideas of what is going to happen, and different anxieties and expectations about it. The leader will also have anxieties and expectations, and worries about whether he/she is communicating.

The tendency I have had as a leader has been to over talk people, to present them with more conceptual complexity at the beginning than they can understand until after they have practiced listening/focusing. So I have developed a simple way of introducing what we will do:

" Listening is a kind of receptive attitude, a way of trying to hear and communicate what you hear going on inside another person, a way of getting at his/her experience, and communicating that you understand it. Specifically, what we'll be working on here is simply saying back in your own words what you hear the other person saying. The aim is to get just what they are saying, without adding or subtracting anything.

" Listening is a way of giving another person a lot of space to tell you how it is for him/her. It is suspending the usual ways people talk to each other about problems (or about anything else). The listener is there to give the talker some room for his/her experience and to try to understand that experience just as it is for the talker. This means that understanding will be " right" only if it is satisfactory to the talker, only if the talker feels inside " Yes, that's what I meant. " Listening is not asking questions, giving advice, or making interpretations. It is also not just parroting the other person's words.

" This seems simple to do, but I think you will find what I did when I first started, that you may think you understand perfectly what the person is saying, but then when you try to say it back to them it comes out to be not what they were trying to communicate. Also, it often seems silly or awkward to people to say back to the person what they just said because they feel they have to add something, make comments, or give advice. So, this may feel awkward at the beginning, but it gets easier as you practice.

" Focusing is a way of listening to yourself, a way of getting past the racket that is usually going on inside to get to a feeling sense of how you are, or about how you feel in this situation you are in. It involves getting in touch with what comes up for you as a feeling answer when you ask, " How am I now? " or " What's the most urgent concern for me now? " or " How do I feel about this situation? " When you are being listened to, it means checking inside to see if what the listener said is really what you meant to communicate; seeing what you meant to say, what the picture or feeling behind your words is/was. Specifically, this means that as a talker, you will say to the listener something like, " Yes, that's it" or “Well, that part of it is right, but I was also saying… " You will need to go past the big temptation to agree with their response to you in order to be nice or avoid conflict. "

After the introduction, you can begin by being a listener for each person, asking them to talk about what they expect from the group, or even just how it is for them to be there that day, how they are responding to starting this group, etc.

Ask people to talk about a feeling or experience in their lives or a feeling they are having in the group right now - something they are willing to share with this new group of people. This may sound obvious, but it's important to tell most people what to talk about or they will talk about themselves in the same way they do in ordinary superficial social conversations.

Remember always to do a lot of what you are teaching. Every interaction can serve as an example of listening/focusing if you make sure to listen and then point out what happened and how it worked. As a general rule, I try to let an experience happen first, and then abstract principles from that experience. My goal is to allow the experience to be created in people, and then create a kind of self-observation or self-consciousness about the experience, so people can conceptualize or articulate what they are doing.

For example, suppose when you start out asking someone to talk about something and they can't think of anything to talk about. Start listening to them from there. Say back to them what they are experiencing - their confusion, hesitation, unwillingness, or whatever it is. This can be the first example of how listening works. After it seems finished, you can each talk about the process of it - what you liked and didn't like, what you experienced, how this kind of talking is different from the usual kind of interactions, how it might be done better, etc. Share your honest reactions you become clear about inside yourself! Then listen to reactions from others.