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This tip was inspired by an interview with D. Graham Burnett by Ezra Klein, in which the two discuss what attention actually IS, as well as the “attention fracking” that we’re all presently enduring and what we can do about it. I highly recommend the entire episode, but here’s a spoiler: at the very end, Klein and Burnett do a live attention exercise together in which they listen to a short piece of music four different ways, and then discuss the differences in their own attention.
And that’s what gave me the idea for this tip. Listening is not just a biomechanical phenonemon of sound waves hitting your ear drum. It’s a word that’s closely tied to meaning-making, to states of consciousness, to relationality, to intuition and psychic power, even to spiritual awakening (e.g. “I heard the call…”).
Coaches are trained to listen in multiple ways, for a variety of things, depending on the client’s goals. We listen for tone, for recurring words, for emotional words, for clarity, for ambiguity, for decision trees, and for conceptual cul-de-sacs.
One of the ways I listen as a coach is listening to discover.
To understand why this is so useful, it helps to remember that the mind is very good at pattern-recognition. It’s how we sense depth in space so we don’t lose our balance or crash into things. It’s how we differentiate a wall from a door, a pencil from a pen, a smartphone from a brick, and so forth.
We can’t survive for long without pattern recognition, but the longer we live, the more it tends to limit our experience, because patterns turn into concepts and concepts accumulate into categories. We use categories to filter our world so that more and more seems familiar and less and less seems new or different.
We filter out most of the world over time.
We are so good at patterns that we often assume things that are similar are the same, and we stop letting new or different things into our world completely. All roses look the same, all flowers look the same, all plants look the same. All greenery becomes background. Or all city buildings, or whatever you see a lot of in your life.
In fact, one reason it can be hard to make personal change is that the people closest to you keep expecting you to be the same, and tend to hold you in the old pattern of “you-ness,” the you they are familiar with.
But spent 30 minutes with a single daffodil and you will see things that will truly astonish you. There is a lot more there than you have trained yourself to believe!
What is true of physical pattern is true of idea pattern as well. That’s why listening to discover is so powerful.
When you listen to discover, you are priming your brain to deliberately push aside all of your pre-existing mental concepts and categories, opening up some empty mental space for something to take shape within. The word discover, like the word curious, is magical, at least for most of us. It tells your brain to expect the unexpected, to actively seek the new or different instead of familiar. If discover doesn’t do it for you, try explore or surprise, or any other word that feels mentally expansive.
When you listen in this way, the person speaking may well say something that even they themselves did not plan. Then you can use other magic words (Tell me more) to open up even more mental space, which I discuss in the tip below from last year:
Experiment with this and please share your thoughts in the comments! If you’d like to learn more about the coaching process, reach out to me for a private consultation.
>> Enjoy learning in groups? Want to apply coaching techniques like this one in a more intentional way? Check out my 6-week Summer course starting next week.