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Deep Listening
deep listening is a silent process to absorb, to learn.
I feel the need to talk to you today about Deep Listening.
A university is often a place of questions and answers, the right answers. We are used to research, talking, writing, passing on knowledge, absorbing knowledge, and reproducing knowledge. One quality that sometimes falls short is deep listening.
The Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel once said, “The word ‘listen’ contains the same letters as the word ‘silent’.” I want to talk about listening today. How about being silent and just listening.
The practice of Deep Listening is to just listen to the other person: Without assumptions, without judgments, without wanting to speak my own truth. We all know the opposite of deep listening too well. We all know people (and we probably have to include ourselves, too), who instead of listening to what is being said to them, they only listen to think about what they want to say.
Deep Listening is the opposite: listening is a silent process to absorb, to learn.
Such listening requires the temporary suspension of the constant judgment of others and a willingness to receive new information — no matter how it may seem to us.
To achieve Deep Listening, we must learn to empty ourselves of our preconceptions, again and again…
