I have been looking at an interesting book from 2025 by Emily Kasriel titled Deep Listening: Transform Your Relationships with Family, Friends, and Foes.
Pages 10 and 11 in the Amazon sample list the eight steps shown above. They are described as follows:
Step One: Create Space. [Pages 83 to 106]. You begin by creating a place of psychological safety for your speaker. There are also physical changes you can make to your environment, so a conversation feels effortless. Your ambition: your speaker feels cherished and inspired to explore new ideas.
Step Two: Listen to Yourself First. [Pages 107 to 132]. You can’t be open to listening to others until you truly listen to yourself. This step explains how you can begin to forge a more positive relationship to your family of shadows, the unacceptable parts of yourself, so they no longer hijack your most important encounters.
Step Three: Be Present. [Pages 133 to 157]. This step will delve into an elliptical yet impactful aspect of Deep Listening – your presence, which transforms standard listening into a profound encounter. We explore what presence is, and how you can cultivate it to tackle the internal and external distractions that obstruct true listening.
Step Four: Be Curious. [Pages 159 to 186]. Here we unpack the qualities you project towards your speaker: curiosity, empathy, awareness of judgements and respect. Acknowledging that you don’t already know what’s in the mind of your speaker can be transformative.
Step Five: Hold the Gaze. [Pages 187 to 206]. This step explores the power of a steady, warm-hearted gaze and other non-verbal cues to communicate to your speaker that they are being heard. We explore how far you can read your speaker’s body language, facial expression and tone to understand what they are not expressing directly.
Step Six: Hold the Silence. [Pages 207 to 227]. In this step we unravel the many types of silence and the reasons why you may resist a pause. How can you use a rich stillness to centre yourself and signal to your speaker your true respect, giving them the space to think, reflect and share?
Step Seven: Reflect Back. [Pages 229 to 254]. Here we uncover how to crystallise what you’re hearing and reflect it back to your speaker. What are the clues that can guide you as you check your understanding of the meaning of what your speaker has conveyed, directly and between the lines?
Step Eight: Go Deeper. [Pages 255 to 279]. This step explains how your listening can illuminate what ordinarily is hidden – your speaker’s deeper narrative. This deeper narrative is vital to understanding your speaker – and can include their unexpressed needs and whether their emotions are in harmony or alive with contradictions.
Each chapter has a list of takeaways. For example:
CREATE SPACE TAKEAWAYS – page 105
Find or create a place of safety | One where your speaker will feel free from any physical or psychological threat.
Contract to cultivate trust | Be transparent at the outset, clarify your intentions. Address how long the conversation is expected to last and what happens with any shared information, if relevant.
Listen before you speak | Unless you are habitually silenced in this relationship.
Get the physical setting right | Avoid glass and metal, which create bad echoes, and seek out wood and fabric. Choose warmer coloured diffused lighting and stay away from the harshness of overhead and blue-white light.
Ensure you are both rested and fed | Before an important conversation.
Adjust your position or take a journey | sit at an angle of 60 degrees to your speaker or walk with a slow rhythm so you are in sync with your bodies and each other.
Turn to nature | Nature can be an enriching setting for a difficult encounter, providing soft fascination and dissolving stress.
Earlier Emily briefly described Deep Listening in a feature article in the Winter 2022 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
My spiral was adapted from this art deco image at OpenClipArt.
No comments:
Post a Comment