Creative listening is much more than hearing
Creative listening is not just hearing and remembering most or even all of what a person said. It is much more. Creative listening involves actively processing what you are hearing and trying to develop meanings, implications, understandings, and fresh ideas. Hearing, thinking, and extending. This may sound easy until you really try doing all of these while listening carefully. I have found that it takes years of practice to become proficient.
Why would someone want to listen creatively? It sounds like serious work … and it is. But it can be wonderfully productive. Providing such look-ahead feedback to a speaker can often redirect and even strengthen what that person is saying or trying to say.
Many people talk as a means of thinking … often termed “thinking out loud”. They are processing their own words as they speak. They are practicing a personal type of creative listening. So why might such a person want to be distracted by another person’s hopefully creative listening as well? It turns out that the participation of a creative listener can often motivate the speaker to begin their own creative listening – listening to themselves and processing in their minds while they are speaking. Some folks are naturally quite good at this rather complex-sounding activity.
Unfortunately, relatively few people have any ability or inclination to listen creatively to themselves. And few listeners go much beyond simply hearing and remembering. These listeners prefer to begin the real thinking part after the speaker has finished what he or she wished to say. Talk, then converse or discuss, is the normal order of such business.
Creative listening begins the processing immediately
Not only does the thinking and imagining process by the listener get underway at the outset, but it can also motivate the speaker to begin their own processing while they speak. Such a combined effort can produce some amazing results very quickly.
Even if this combined effort only partially takes place, it can nearly always add significantly to the overall speech-and-discuss process. I would venture to state that, in my extended experience, this is so often the case and fully justifies any effort to get it underway.
The willingness of most people to do some thinking-while-speaking in the presence of an experienced creative listener is most fortunate. I have found it to be extremely easy to initiate after even the briefest of introductions by a motivated speaker. Such a speaker almost always welcomes the creative input but so often results in a very different kind of process. In a decision-making context, the process becomes one of situation resolution as well as situation description.
This is what an effective decision coach should be able to provide, at least in my extended and varied experience with decision-making.
Creative listening works differently for each person
We are all different in so many ways. What works for one person may not work for most others. Some people prefer to have their say, without any response from the listener until afterward. Others may rely on the coach to get the discussion underway before they offer their thoughts. Still others may begin with a number of questions that may require answers before the coaching process itself can truly start.
One of the most important things for a decision coach to do is to discover as quickly and quietly as possible how the speaker’s mind works in this respect. There is no one-size-fits-all in this business. The right coaching process generally emerges from initial discussion as the coach applies his or her experience to the current client and situation.
This means that there is no going-in coaching process that I follow. If a client asks for an outline of what we might discuss, I would respond with something like … “we will develop the process that works best for you by actually talking and thinking”. The right process for you will simply emerge as we talk.
Creative listening involves not only listening and responding in an active, actionable manner but also gaining an understanding as quickly as possible of the way in which a client’s mind works and prefers to interact.
