A good listener is alert,
searching for those chance flashes of the world,
moving mountains in their mind.
If you blink, you'll miss it.
Broadly speaking, listening styles exhibit two extremes:
A) Find the truth in what is being said
B) Find the falsehood in what is being said
In A), one works with the conversation partner, saying "yes and",
refining the shared viewpoint with active listening approaches. It
recognizes the short comings of language do not imply shortcomings of
organization of thoughts, and poorly formulated positions. In general,
language is a severe straight-jacket for developed thought frameworks.
It recognizes semantics are defined by connections to other thoughts and
terms.
In B), one confronts the conversation partner with holes and flaws in
the language, sometimes finding flaws in the argument. Often debate
becomes semantic in nature, as short comings of language are inherent
in its serial, unmathematical and improvised nature. Often this
distracts from convergence to jointly formulated positions, and
conceptual and thought frameworks.
Other extremes likely exist.
For example, a third extreme, C), is team free association. Governed less by logic, and more by first impressions, conversations evolve rapidly and richly.
-- (c) 2015 DBW, all rights reserved.
