Listening Beneath the Words

Often, words don’t truly describe things nearly as well as they describe our relationship to them. This is where misunderstanding and confusion come from. In our haste to communicate, we hear the words, but ignore the heart of what is being said.

We stop at the words when, in fact, real listening happens in the spaces beneath the words. MIT Professor Peter Senge describes it eloquently when he says, “To listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. Listen not only to the ‘music,’ but to the essence of the person speaking.”

Our ears operate at the speed of sound, which is a lot slower than the speed of light. Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in yourself, i.e., turning down your inner volume, so that you can slow your mind to hear at the natural speed of your ears and hear beneath the words to their meaning.

Generative listening is an act of grace. It’s a force that pulls us into quiet, attentive presence. In our work with couples, we teach that generative listening requires profound commitment to the challenges of giving one’s full presence, full engagement, and full unconditional positive regard in the “now.” Generative listening is the commitment to be 100% fully alive in the “present moment.”

We’ve also learned that generative listening allows us to land deeply into the world of the other, surf the waves of their emotion and see the landscape of their face with “new eyes.” In committing to our ongoing development of this level of generative listening, we create both our own transformation and the transformation of the other.