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Why it is important to learn to focus
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Why it is important to learn to focus
When we first started teaching listening, we put almost all the training emphasis on teaching accurate listening. This didn't work very well, as it put a lot of pressure on people to be " good at it”, to learn how to be helpful. We also found that it is very hard to be a good listener without learning how to be listened to, without learning what it is like to struggle with your own inner space. Also, there are many times when listening that people get hit by their own feelings about what the talker is saying, and it is important here to have the ability to go into what those feelings are so that they don't block the helping process.
Later stages of learning listening/focusing
These can be flexible according to the wants of the group. Usually we have spent many weeks dividing into pairs and just practicing, trading hours or half-hours. We have found it useful to spend half the time talking about one particular pair's interaction, with different people taking turns each week. This has worked best for us using a tape recorder, so that we can stop the tape and each person can say what was going on for them just then. The format for this is essentially the same as in the beginning, with the listener and talker both discussing the interaction, going into thoughts and feelings about what happened, but with other people sharing their own experience (see chapter in this book entitled " Learning Together: The Way We Do It" ).
This part of learning listening/focusing can be very exciting. It's fascinating to learn in detail how different people are, how each person's experience is uniquely their own; and also, to have the excitement of sharing deeply felt common ground. There is a lot of time to explore what it's like inside you, what furthers your living and what does not, the ways you block yourself from feeling, what gets in the way of focusing; to learn about all the different complex things that go on during the experience of listening to and helping another person, when listening and focusing is helpful and when it is not, and other things that are helpful besides these - ways to integrate listening with consciousness-raising, how focusing is the same or different from meditation, and so on. It's like having a group of people sharing some of their deepest thoughts and feelings about the nature of their growth and change.
Finally, I want to add that this group has the same problems as other groups - lots of interactional issues come up around difficulties with deciding what the group will do and what it will not. Some people stay and some people drop out. As with any group, people have to be willing to say what they want, to work for that, to deal with interactional issues in the group and to work out a common goal. This is a process, it takes shape over time, and results in a unique character, probably different in the end from these guidelines. Let us know how your listening group comes out!
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References
Noel, Joseph R. and DeChenne, Timothy K. I-We-Thou Multi-centered Counseling and Psychotherapy, " Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, Winter 1971, Vol. 8, No. 4, 282-284.
Rosenberg, Marshall B. From now on. (Available through Community Psychological Consultants; 1740 Gulf Drive; St. Louis, Missouri 63130. ) 1976.
Ann Weiser, Common problems in a beginning listening group
My name is Ann Weiser and I've been helping to run the new people's group on Sunday nights for about ten weeks. Sometimes I feel strong and confident about being able to tell people about Listening; sometimes I'm mainly aware of how little I know and how uncertain it all is anyway. These two parts of me are present in this writing.
I'm trying to show some of the things that often give trouble when people are beginning to learn Listening. I do it by giving examples of interactions that could occur. None of these actually has occurred; they’re all exaggerated to make a point. In the comments following the dialogues, the teacher part of me finds it easy to say what should have happened. Now the student part of me wants to say, it's never that easy. I'm not so sure about what people ought to do. I just know the way I like to see people Listening when they're beginning, and these dialogues are not it.
1. The conversational horror
Mary, looking straight at John, smiling: " I'm not sure what I'm going to talk about. I'm a little nervous at being in a group like this. "
John: " You feel nervous and you're not sure what to talk about. "
Mary: " Uh-huh. I always have a hard time speaking before groups of people. "
John: " You know you have trouble with things like this. ”
Mary: " That's right. It's just the way I am. Well, I guess that's all. "
Mary is treating her interaction with John as if it were a conversation. She is looking at him and her attention is on conveying information to him. She is speaking of things she already knows about herself.
It's important to remember that Listening is not at all like conversation. The person being Listened to should turn her attention on herself, as a step in the enterprise of learning more about herself. The Listener doesn't even have to know what the problem is about in order for the process to proceed (although for me as a Listener I know it feels better to know). Probably a good thing for the Focusser to do, especially when first learning, is to close her eyes or look downward, as a reminder to herself that this is not an ordinary conversation and as an aid to going into the inner landscape.
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