Listen As If Your Life Depended On It

After more than a week of creative writing in Taos, New Mexico, it's only fitting that I take a break from originality and shamelessly steal this headline. It's a provocative sentence from the new book, Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up (written by the head of Stanford University's Drama Department).

Listening has been on my mind before I departed to Taos. I'd recently agreed to be a co-speaker with Pete Blackshaw, CMO of Intelliseek, on Staying on Top of the Buzz: Blog Monitoring Tools and Techniques at the upcoming Blog Business Summit (in San Francisco, August 17-19, 2005).

I equate "monitoring and tracking" with listening.

It ought to be obvious that a conversational media like blogs would involve equal parts listening and talking. But I'm not so sure if listening is valued as much as speaking. I say this because it's tempting to whip out blog posts, send out press releases, get "the word out" and fully neglect to allow words in, seek out and pay attention to feedback, note the edges and fringes of your industry and adjacent industries, and keep up with reading other people's blogs. I know because I succumb to this temptation all the time.

A blogging industry friend shared that a former client of his excused themselves from listening: "We don't have time to read other blogs." They saw themselves in the publishing business, alas, which they deemed remotely disconnected somehow from listening. They're blogs are not well read needless to say.

Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small - we haven't the time - and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time. -  Georgia O'Keefe

We haven't the time to listen. Yeah, it's a common refrain. 

Last week it occurred to me that art appears to be an intricate two-part process.

First: Keenly observe, listen, perceive, wonder. This includes listening to what moves you. Artist Inger Jirby (picture left is her Moon over Orilla Verde) says that she sketches only what stirs her soul. She listens for an "emotional connection." Only if that "emotional connection" is sustained does she then take the sketch and paint the canvas.  (Part two in a later post...)

Ernest Hemingway wrote, "When people talk, listen completely. Don't be thinking what you're going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe."

We absolutely cannot be artists nor marketers without pure observation and listening as prerequisites.

I continue to be reminded that acting (yes, it sounds counter-intuitive) is one path to these skills that have laid dormant. For instance, last week we did an exercise which instructor Jeff Davis learned from an acting class. We didn't try to put ourselves into their shoes. We didn't try to be witty or remarkably astute. We just were present to their presence.We sat in pairs and simply stated observations, perceptions and what we wondered about while looking into the eyes of another human being.

Observe, perceive, wonder: Oh, how simple.

Right now, I observe how difficult and strained this post has been to write. I perceive a reluctance to continue with the deep listening I dove into over the last week. I perceive that something about listening involves being attentive and I sense a touch of raw vulnerability in it too. I perceive its power is rawer yet than speaking and that inexplicably is frightening. I wonder why and how listening bonds even amid disagreement. I wonder as I look at the seascape painting hanging on the wall if the ocean listens to the fishes? If the wind listens to the birds? I wonder if listening is enough, is everything.

A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized that prayer is listening. - Soren Kierkegaard

BONUS: I've just re-read fellow co-author Jory Des Jardin's piece for the More Space book this morning. Her true-life Calvin character (a long-time blogger) is a classic example of a someone who values listening. Explaining blogging to Jory (he was the instigator to get her own blog up): "These aren't articles I'm posting. They're conversations," he said. "You can't get wait to get these in print. They happen in real time."

He knew that some VP I wanted to get a meeting with had a long-standing grunge against our company for an article we produced touting a competitor's new product release.

"How did you know this?" I asked Calvin, thinking he'd read it in some insider column available for an exorbitant subscription fee.

"He told me," Calvin said.

Calvin also knew who was disappointed with the events we held for the industry, which speakers tanked, what the word on the street was about our new launching event in Amsterdam. Yet he never polled, surveyed or hired a marketing team to find out our customers' perceptions of us, nor did he ask. They simply told him. And in return, he told them things that he knew about hot products, open jobs, must-see demos. Despite all he was told, it seemed the debt of information owed him was always greater. Not like he was keeping track; I was. - Jory Des Jardin, from More Space: Nine Antidotes to Complacency in Business (edited by Todd Satterson)

p.s. Don't fret, there will be practical discovery techniques covered in the Blog Business Summit session. But they're all fairly worthless if listening isn't valued.

Comments

[Ric]

Interesting point about listening - I've been blogging since March, but I've spent considerably more time reading other's blogs, and commenting on their posts than I have writing my own. At first I thought this was because I had little to say, now I'm thinking that I'm just playing a part in a much larger conversation, and that posting myself for the sake of it is like talking over the top of the other conversants - just plain rude! When I have a point I'd like to make, I'll post. In the meantime I'll (try to) keep up with others are saying.

[Patricia Ryan Madson]

Thank you so much for mentioning my book, Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up (Bell Tower, 2005). It means a lot that the message is moving into the world, and that somebody is "listening."
I appreciate your citing the book.
Warm regards,
Patricia