Listen To Your Listening

TAoN No. 82: Better listening with Ximena Vengoechea. Plus a new icebreaker, and more.

Sep 06, 2021

Hello and welcome. New readers: You have joined at an unusual time, as the newsletter has been somewhat disrupted by Ida. (More here, and in the programming notes below.) I’m getting back on track but this issue may still have some rough edges.

“Listen,” by Simon Law on Flickr, some rights reserved

TAoN addresses the upsides of careful listening all the time. Often that’s in the context of listening to the world — the sounds of your neighborhood, your office, a place you’re visiting for the first time, and so on.

But obviously, truly listening to other people is really important, too. (After all, what’s the point of asking icebreaker questions if you don’t really attend to the answer?)

So I was excited to read Listen Like You Mean it: Reclaiming the Lost Art of True Connection, the recent book from writer, illustrator, and user-research expert Ximena Vengoechea. Vengoechea honed her listening skills as a researcher helping the likes of LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter understand how customers actually use their products. But the book channels her listening-lessons-learned into a form that can help improve any kind of listening relationship. You can read an excerpt here.

I asked Vengoechea if she could offer some preliminary listening-improvement tips to TAoN readers. She replied:

“Listening is an active process, but we often don't think of it that way — we usually just ‘show up’ and let our ears do the rest. But when you slow down and start to pay attention to your listening, you learn a lot about yourself, and your conversation partner.”

As a first step in that direction, she suggested two things to tune into, “to deepen your listening.” In her words:

Your body — What is your body telling you as you listen? Are you breathing deeply or is your breath shallow? Is that a knot in your stomach or a tightening in your chest? Sometimes we don't realize we are having an emotional response to something that's being said until we burst with emotion — but tuning into our body can be a helpful clue that something's up.
Your default listening mode — Each of us has a habitual way of listening, a particular filter we hear the world through that's informed by our personality and early relationships. This default listening mode biases us to respond in conversation in a given way. Are you a natural problem-solver, always scanning for the problem (and solution) in a conversation? Do you tend to be an identifier, prone to offering your version of a situation unprompted (Me too! That's just like my experience with...). Maybe you are more the defuser, ready to crack a joke and lighten the mood whenever things get heavy.
No mode is better than the rest, but it's useful to know your own mode so that you can adapt it as needed, since sometimes our instinct about how to listen is wrong.

There’s a quiz in Listen Like You Mean It that helps readers identify their own primary listening mode.

I really like the way both of these suggestions prod us to foreground the act of listening. It reminds me of friend of TAoN Shanna Trenholm’s recent thoughts about “leading with curiosity” as a listener — and it strikes me as a useful starting point to consider listening on both a physical and analytical level.

Check out the book here. Vengoechea also has a newsletter that will likely be of interest to many TAoN readers, Letters from Ximena,

Thanks Ximena!!

Programming Notes

Thanks for all the kind reactions to last week’s post; power is getting restored in New Orleans and I’ll be back in the home office soon, and back to a regular schedule.
Pretty sure.
I hope.
Anyway, Thursday’s post will be the finale of the Summer School series. That’s for paid subscribers only, so if you haven’t signed on, consider doing so!

In Other News

“I'm sort of goofing off a lot but I sort of feel like a lot of that goofing off time is strategic.” I was thrilled to be interviewed by Rubi McGrory for her excellent newsletter Iridescent Ordinary, which I recommend. She’s been doing some great thinking about curiosity lately. And I’ve been a fan of her and her work for ages. Thank you, Rubi!
Every year I thoroughly enjoy teaching a writing-about-objects workshop as part of the SVA Design Research program’s amazing summer intensive. My workshop is just one component, and participants produce a whole range of writing under the eye of a killer faculty group. Results from the most recent iteration are collected here in the online pub Still Processing. (Here are some of the “Objects of Home” essays from my workshop.) Give it a look!
Why hyperlinks are blue.
Somewhat related to today’s main item: Good KERA Think interview with Joe Keohane on his book The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World.
Bach every day. BBC radio doc.
How To Let Your Mind Wander. (NYT.) I’ve been thinking about this subject a lot lately; not fully satisfied with this piece, but interesting. Do you have tips on productive mind-wandering? Let me know.
Friend of TAoN Lee Sachs deploys observational skill (and humor) to unearth and critique the often weird world of branding, in his Museum of Marketing Madness. Fun stuff!
During the runup to Ida, I somehow came across Windfinder, which I guess is designed for water-sports folks, but which I found useful for hurricane tracking. It’s quite pretty.

Okay that’s it!

As always, I value your feedback (suggestions, critiques, positive reinforcement, constructive insults, etc.), as well as your tips or stories or personal noticing rituals, things we need a word for, and of course your icebreakers: consumed@robwalker.net. Or use the comments!

The Art of Noticing

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