Listening With Your Whole Body

The art of effectively listening is, in fact, a practice that must be cultivated. To be engaged with someone else’s story, whether a seemingly mundane report of their day’s activities or a vulnerable sharing of life’s crossroads, is one of the greatest gifts we can give to someone else. So do we do it well? And is it just common-sense skills?

Well, my answer to both of those questions is likely a confident “no.” We know that the average attention span has decreased significantly over the last two decades, attributable to many factors, not least among them our increasing online activity and constant connection to our smartphones. We have reprogrammed our minds to believe that it is necessary to be productive in every moment of every day and that multi-tasking is the standard, monotasking the exception, and hypertasking becoming more and more common.

Further evidence to this fact that we may not always be getting it right is the “Quiet Quitting”  era of our current working culture. There are many reasons, of course, that people choose to leave their jobs, but feeling undervalued and unheard are significant contributers.

So if we want to retain our employees, we want our students and residents to heed our instruction, and we want our interpersonal relationships to thrive, how do we cultivate better social practice in this area? One solution is to make sure we are listening with our whole bodies. First, are we practicing mindfulness regularly? Are we engaging in grounding practices that help us to bring our full self into an interaction? Or are we always allowing over stimulation and the constant need for a hyper task focus to get in the way of actually being able to present in a moment?

Our bodies have a lot to do with how we think and how we orient ourselves in a conversation. We’ve all heard the adage that if we force ourselves to smile that we will eventually begin to feel happier. Though trite, there is some truth here. Our body’s posture especially can affect how we are perceived in a room and also how we attune ourselves to our value in the space. So first, remember that to be present with someone else and to really listen, we must first regularly practice being present with ourselves and second, we should be aware of our nonverbals. Is our body in an open posture? Are we turned toward our conversation partner? Is our gaze diverted away? Are we constantly checking our smart phone or watch? Even microgestures can send messages that our minds and emotions are elsewhere. If we will put ourselves in open postures, allow ourselves to provide nonverbal feedback along the way (using paralanguage and nodding, etc.), we will essentially be training our minds to follow our bodies. When we use our whole body to listen, both before and during the interaction, we can enter a space and dialogue more fully. And people will leave interactions with us with a stronger sense of value and voice.