(I don’t know how to make this captivating but it’s genius) Seven Guidelines for the Art of Listening
“I suggest the following seven guidelines to help improve one’s abilities to make the transition from a simpler model of listening to a more complex one.
1. Never be in a hurry to reach conclusions. Conclusions are the most ephemeral part of your research.
2. What you are seeing depends on your point of view. In order to see what your point of view is, you have to change it.
3. In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume that he or she is right and ask him or her to help you understand what makes him or her right.
4. The emotions are a central instrument of cognition if you learn how to read their language, which is relational and built on metaphors.
5. A good listener is an explorer of possible worlds. The signals that he or she finds most important are the ones that seem both negligible and annoying, both marginal and irritating, because they refuse to mesh with previous convictions and certainties.
6. A good listener is happy to accept the self-contradictions that come to the fore in personal thoughts and interpersonal communications. Mis-understandings are accepted as opportunities for entering the most exciting field of all: the creative management of conflict.
7. To become an expert in listening you must follow a humor-based methodology. But once you have learned how to listen, humor arises on its own.
Helping ourselves and others to go against the tide is indeed very difficult. But it is fun and personally, I do not know anything more interesting and engrossing to be done in a lifetime.”