Listening isn’t just about staying quiet to hear the other person all the way the end of their thought.
Listening also demands that we hear others’ words with no personal Filters associated with that communication. That’s a much taller order than simply shutting your mouth until the appropriate time to speak.
We all have Filters. We collect them throughout our entire life as part of our Personal Gravity. A Filter can be a specific definition or impression associated with a word, a reaction to a certain communication style or a memory trigger brought on by a phrase, intonation or action. Filters abound.
True communication goes beyond simply listening – it includes releasing our Filters to listen objectively.
That’s not easy, especially since we often don’t recognize our Personal Gravity, especially the filters we’ve developed throughout our lifetime. That’s the sneaky thing about Gravity. It’s good at hiding, integrating itself so tightly into the fabric of our thinking and our behaviors that we assume it’s a natural part of our being.
Which is why it’s hard to find those Filters. How do you ditch something that is so engrained in your being that you barely even know it’s there?
I’ve had a number of phone conversations lately where Filters came front and center on both sides of the line. In all cases, people reacted with different impressions to a word or phrase – taking the meaning of what I said differently from my intention. In a couple of cases we recognized the delta immediately and resolved it by diving deeper into the intention behind my words. Those cases were with friends I know well. In the other cases, well, a disconnect began. I believe that’s because those cases were a) with people who were new associates, b) we were slow to recognize the disconnect and c) we were not as able to discuss the deltas in our Filters because we weren’t as familiar with each other.
I learned another big lesson. Even if I’m the one speaking – I have to listen. I must pay attention to someone’s reactions to my words, to their responses that don’t quite jive with my intent, to the little signs that show a disconnect.
Ditching Filters takes two key communication skills – listening carefully and the willingness to openly discuss differences in our filtered intrepretation of the spoken word. That’s the only way to avoid Filters and their fallout (a disconnect). Listening, noticing the initial signs of a disconnect and then communicating in more detail about that Filter. Matching the meaning of a word or phrase with the intent of the communication.
When we listen and clarify – we communicate clearly. When we take it for granted that another party hears words in the same way we mean them – well, welcome to Personal Gravity.
