What is Listening?

What is listening? What happens when we listen? And why is it important? These questions and more are explored in the salons contained within this site. Visitors are encouraged to join a salon and participate.

Salons

Self-talk Virtual Workshop

This Salon will host the Self Talk Virtual Workshop. Participants are encouraged to post Questions and Comment here prior to the workshop, or email your Questions or Comments to either of the workshop Facilitators srazaee@listen4achange.org and...

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Listen Here!

Welcome to Listen4AChange! You are invited to share your understanding of listening and learn more about what listening really amounts to. Listening changes our worldviews and thus our worlds.

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Listening and BS (Blame and Shame–Revisited 2022)

While preparing a presentation on Self-Talk for the 2022 Idaho Conference on Refugees this following December 2017 post came to mind, written sometime during the Advent season nearly four years ago.  When I conducted the Self-talk workshops at the University it was my...

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About

Learn about the background of the online salons found within this site.

Resources

A list of online resources related to the subject of listening.

Events

A list of past and future events related to listening.

What is Listening?

What is listening? What happens when we listen? And why is it important? These questions and more are explored in the salons contained within this site. Visitors are encouraged to join a salon and participate.

About

Learn about the background of the online salons found within this site.

Resources

A list of online resources related to the subject of listening.

Events

A list of past and future events related to listening.

Listening Begins with the Self

What is listening? This seemingly simple question is the purpose for hosting this webpage. My aim is to challenge how we think about phenomena assumed to be listening and to raise questions and make claims about the nature of this least taught most used communication ability. Resources and links to learn about listening will also be available here. Listening, researchers now agree, is a cognitive process that we observe as a behavior; since listening is a cognitive process it essentially begins with the self; no one can listen for you. We do however learn our listening behaviors in a listening community; in fact today we learn our listening behaviors in many different listening communities. Thus it is important to distinguish between overt behaviors and covert cognitive processes. While we commonly talk to ourselves it is fundamentally another matter to listen to oneself. Here’s an insight I gained from Neil Douglas-Klotz in his book Desert Wisdom that affirms my point: “Our modern world does not encourage depth. It encourages being driven, led, or swept away by our perceived needs, which are often compulsively programmed into us based on someone else’s priorities. Without apportioning blame to education, religion, business, government, or unhealthy family dynamics, one can simply say that, in the modern era, we are not encouraged to be in touch with our own inner, unrehearsed nature any more than we are encouraged to contact the wilderness of nature outside us. As that nature rapidly deteriorates to the same degree that human institutions do, there is a certain urgency for us to contact the depth of our self.” Neil Douglas-Klotz (1995) Desert Wisdom: Sacred Middle Eastern Writings from the Goddess through the Sufis.

"We empty of their humanity those to whom we deny speech."

-George Steiner

"God is the listener inside all of us."

-Me

"Narcissism is the antithesis of listening."

- Patrick Cronin