Why people don't listen

One of the things I'm aiming to touch on in the workshop I'm organizing is why people don't listen when they should. And this week has been a study on the subject, as well.

Looking at it from the positive, rather than my usual negative, angle, a good listener has the following characteristics:

• Commited: This one is obvious: if you aren't really interested in what the other person is saying, you won't listen very carefully.
• Confident: People who are jittery and nervous about something, tend to hear anything you tell them as confirming their worst fears, regardless of what you are actually saying.
• Questioning: When I was a teacher, I soon learned that the biggest obstacle to learning is always when somebody believes that they know already. On Tuesday I took a sickie to go to the informal meetup a bunch of Transitioners do at a cafe to see if they would help with the workshop, and I saw a great example of this: They didn't think it was a problem at all to do such things at a time when anybody who works full-time couldn't attend, because after all, it was just an informal thing, right? Except that when the formal channels don't work, everything works informally, it's all a club of friends, and nobody questions friends. That same evening I went to a talk by Malcolm Gladwell ("The tipping point" guy), and he talked about the mistakes done by experts, the mistakes done by overconfidence. This is another name for the same thing.

You'd think that there is a fine line between being too confident and being too questioning, and if people were always logical, it would be just a matter of striking the right balance. Unfortunately, people are often not logical, and are perfectly capable of believing contradictory things. The worst cases of somebody not listening is when somebody manages to be at the same time not confident enough and not questioning enough. On one hand, they positively know they have the right answer, but at the same time, something is nagging them deep down that they may be wrong, and they will hear anything you tell them as confirming their worst fear that they have screwed up big time... which means they don't want to listen at all. This is often the origin of denial.

On Wednesday I went to the Transition forum meeting, and it was again really good. There was only one false note, when somebody raised their voice, and it was the Fatherly Figure over-reacting to what I had said. At the end of the meeting, I had a long chat with him to try to break through his denial. He is at heart a control freak that is constantly in denial of things going wrong in front of his own eyes, and he secretly hates me because I make him confront the facts. Luckily, we agreed on something satisfactory for both: instead of him trying to give me lessons constantly on how poisonous my attitude is, he will "translate" for me my messages into a more palatable form. The beauty of the arrangement is that it leaves to him the job of breaking through his own denial, in the attempt of trying to do it for others. For once, I think I've done a perfect people trick.