Listening is perhaps the clearest path to understanding others and resolving conflict, but it can be difficult to practice. The desire to disagree, prove we’re “right,” and engage in hardball tactics often get in the way. Here, we consider how transformative listening can be, then study how deep listening plays out in conflict examples.
Learning When Forced to Listen
In the 1980s, Jessie Daniels entered the sociology PhD program at the University of Texas with a lot of assumptions about the world, as she writes in a new anthology of personal essays by sociologists, Between Us: Healing Ourselves and Changing the World Through Sociology. Some of those assumptions were profoundly shaken when she secured a research position with Dr. Joe Feagin.
Feagin assigned Daniels the task of transcribing interviews with middle-class Black Americans about their experience with racism. At the time, Daniels, who is white, naively assumed that because the Civil Rights Act had made racial discrimination illegal in the United States, the interviewees might be “overly sensitive, looking for discrimination where there was none,” she recalls.
In fact, she soon found, the interviewees were slow to complain. When they did share stories of possible discrimination, they agonized over how to interpret them. One woman, for instance, described being seated at the back of a restaurant, near the kitchen. “Oh, come on,” Daniels thought. “That could happen to anyone.” But as Daniels noted, the woman on the tape “couldn’t hear me, and I couldn’t actually interrupt her, so I just kept typing.”
In her interview, the woman expressed how confusing the incident was: “It could be discrimination, or it could not be, but now I’ve got to spend my energy to try and figure this out, because you know, I don’t want to be one of those complaining types.” She concluded, “It’s an exhausting way to go through life.” From nearly every interviewee, Daniels heard similar stories of “internal calculation in response to discrimination.”
By listening closely to the interviewees—with no opportunity to question or rebut them—Daniels gained a deeper understanding of systemic racism and the pain and confusion it causes. “By the end of transcribing those interviews, something fundamental in me had shifted,” she writes. “Instead of arguing or disagreeing with the Black people I’d spent time listening to, I was in solidarity with them.”
Daniels’ story illustrates how listening deeply to other people can challenge our preconceived beliefs. Listening can be especially beneficial in bringing disputing parties together, as the following conflict examples suggest.
Transforming Your Listening Skills
In her book Transformative Negotiation: Strategies for Everyday Change and Equitable Futures, Sarah Federman explores real-world conflict examples to illustrate how negotiation can help those in financial precarity achieve greater stability. While teaching negotiation at the University of Baltimore, she learned to adapt traditional negotiation training to the lives of her students, who were coping with problems such as negotiating car insurance claims and adapting to life after incarceration.
Teaching active listening skills in negotiation was core to this training. In particular, Federman encourages her students to “ask five information-seeking questions with no agenda” of others in their lives. “This means they can only ask questions to better understand the person’s world, not to lead the person toward or away from a particular solution,” she writes.
One student asked the following five questions of his brother, who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and recently discharged from the hospital:
- How do you feel?
- How do you like the new medication?
- How do we make sure you stay on the medication and go for quarterly checkups?
- Would you talk to me whenever you feel like the drugs are not working?
- Do you need anything?
By asking these questions and listening carefully, the student gained a new understanding of how much his brother had suffered and of his past behavior. As Federman writes, “Good listening can reduce household and workplace tension, preventing conflict and making negotiations easier when they occur.”
Listening Is Contagious
Turning to conflict examples in a galaxy far, far away, mediator and coach Danielle Blumenberg describes the power of listening in negotiation in an essay for the new anthology Star Wars and Conflict Resolution II: My Negotiations Will Not Fail, which gleans conflict-resolution strategies from the Star Wars universe. In the film The Force Awakens, Blumenberg describes encounters between the self-reliant scavenger Rey, hero Luke Skywalker, and dark side warrior Kylo Ren.
In one scene, Rey tries telling Luke about the “darkness she feels calling to her,” Blumenberg writes, but “Luke doesn’t listen well—instead, he reacts with fear and shuts her down.” In a later encounter with Kylo, Rey “mirrors Luke’s approach, casting accusations at Kylo and not seeking information.” Clearly, poor listening can become a vicious cycle.
But rather than shutting her down, as Luke did, Kylo “responds with curiosity”; he ignores her insults and begins asking questions. The next time they connect, Rey reciprocates by asking Kylo questions and seeking to understand his behavior. “Their mutual listening begins to move them past their conflict,” writes Blumenberg. The key to this breakthrough was Kylo’s ability to move beyond accusation and respond by listening closely—a negotiation strategy we can all adopt.
What have you learned from recent conflict examples in your life?