CHAPTER 3
Insight Listening
Whether you have insights more frequently on your own or with others, one type of listening is particularly conducive to having insights. It is a key component to The Art of Insight, and it, too, is more a state of mind than a process. We refer to it as Insight Listening.
Everyone we’ve worked with has derived some value from learning to listen for insights. Based on reports from our clients, insights routinely occur during conversation. They occur in conversations between individuals, in small groups, or even in your head while you are talking to yourself. Listening to talk radio during a morning commute can spark an insight, but so can sitting through a boring sales pitch. In fact, you don’t even need to be a participant in the conversation for it to trigger an insight. It turns out that it is all about how we listen.
Having more insights boils down to two things: being a bit disciplined to look for them and noticing the presence or absence of the feeling that is indicative of an Insight State of Mind. While both of these are simple in concept, unless you are graced with the disposition of a yogi, time and mindfulness are required to help cultivate these states.
No single path or technique will lead you to an Insight State of Mind without fail; however, Insight Listening may be the best chance you’ve got because it promotes a suspension of overthinking. When we employ Insight Listening, we are utilizing a skill that amplifies the probability that insights will occur by pointing us toward the Insight State of Mind.
In previous chapters, we have cautioned against the overuse of employing techniques as a way of achieving an Insight State of Mind. Over the years, we have found that, on occasion, we all find techniques that we think are useful but that in most cases will become less reliable over time. Our thinking is what keeps us from an Insight State of Mind, and employing techniques and methods generally requires additional conscious thought, which is exactly what we don’t want for insights. Otherwise, this amounts to using thinking to combat thinking, and having such duels in one’s head at the same time can be difficult.
To the extent that you can find value in a method or technique that helps you achieve an insightful state, use it, but ultimately you should be looking for something less mechanical and more lasting. You should be looking for the omnipresent connection to your inner wisdom that will guide you to where you need to go. Look for the state of mind that will foster the spontaneous generation of whatever thought, insight, or idea you need in that moment and you will be pleased with the results. When you notice you are overthinking, more often than not the simple recognition that unconscious thoughts are present is enough to allow the mind to relax and become more receptive to insights once again.
How to Listen to Others
It turns out that there are lots of ways of listening. We often try to commit to memory everything a person is saying so that we will be prepared afterward to accurately repeat everything he just said. We are taught to listen this way from a very early age in school, but when we do so, we leave little room for our own original thoughts. Other times we compare what we hear to what we already know. (“Does this person have a good point here, or is it really hogwash?”) More often than we would like to admit, we are often really only partially listening. All this amounts to listening for content. We hold thoughts in our heads, thinking and reasoning about what we hear. We get so wrapped up in listening to our own thoughts, preparing our next point or our counterargument, that we miss out on the core of what is being said. Occasionally we get so distracted by our own thoughts that we hardly listen at all and end up daydreaming, clueless about what the person has just said. In each of these cases, thinking is active and engaged with a separate conversation occurring in our heads.
Insight Listening is a naturally occurring state that is more about being present and reflective than being active and engaged. When you listen for insight, you are emptying the clutter in your head and looking for fresh thoughts. You should not be deliberately exercising your intellect, trying to figure things out, or deciding what’s most important. With practice, you’ll be able to use this type of listening to hear more richly and think more creatively. The state is akin to listening to music. When little or nothing is on your mind, the music can touch you, but if you overthink it, it won’t. Listening for insights is similar. The idea is to let the words wash over you without getting attached to any of your thoughts. Ideally, your mind should operate in a comfortable idle. You are not thinking, taking action, or reacting to what you are hearing. When we listen for content, we hold thoughts in our conscious mind, often to the point that we are incapable of allowing new thoughts to occur. With Insight Listening, you disengage the intellect and allow the detailed content of the words to fall away. In this form of listening, nothing in particular sticks; it is all just absorbed, and whatever is most important will spring to mind in the form of an insight.
The state of Insight Listening is not unlike the experience of watching a good movie for the first time. We enjoy the movie because we allow ourselves to drop our thinking and get carried off into the plot. If you watch a movie like a film critic and spend your energy thinking about the quality of the cast, costumes, and lighting, you will miss out on what is most important: the experience of being transported to a different time and place. The same experience happens if you go to a concert, read a novel, or look at a painting. You have one experience when you are actively analyzing and a completely different one when you are not. Nothing is wrong with intellectualizing these events, but unless you allow yourself to be present and transported by them, don’t expect to have as robust an emotional experience. The best way to facilitate an insight is to stop your intellect from taking over your thoughts from a reflective, movie-watching state. This is Insight Listening.
Our colleague Ken Manning describes it this way:
One way we talk about listening is that it is something that we do—like we take personal credit for the phenomenon. But listening is occurring on its own, just like the heart beating, just like seeing. I can say I am seeing and I can even direct that experience, but seeing is happening anyway. It’s the same with listening. It’s a natural function that occurs whether directed or not.
Insight Listening and Fresh Thoughts
The underlying purpose of Insight Listening is to promote an Insight State of Mind, where fresh thoughts and therefore insights will abound. We will talk more specifically about listening for fresh thoughts below, but keep in mind as you work through the exercises in this chapter that this is the ultimate goal. The more fresh thoughts you have, the greater the chance of an insight hitting. The practice of Insight Listening is about training yourself to think freshly, to identify the feeling of fresh thoughts and an Insight State of Mind and, of course, to recognize the all-important arrival of an insight.
Practicing Insight Listening
Over the years, we have used several different approaches to teaching Insight Listening to our clients. For many, listening to our own thoughts is the hardest thing to do—probably because it is hard to police our own thinking. So we will begin with settings that for most are somewhat easier.
A great time to practice is when you are with a large group of people and unlikely to be noticed. This could be when you are listening to a concert, play, movie, speech, sermon, or class lecture. You can run short training sessions with yourself. Practice Insight Listening for one minute, then shift to content listening, and then shift back and forth. This will let you develop fluency in both modes, as well as familiarity with the feeling of Insight Listening.
As you are Insight Listening, try disregarding the speaker’s content and instead concentrate on discerning the feeling behind the words. Get used to being aware of the feeling of the situation: what sort of state of mind is it inducing in you? Is it elevating? Depressing? Fear inducing? Neutral? Using your own state of mind as a barometer can be helpful in a number of ways. It gives you information about how the other person is thinking. It can help keep you from becoming immersed in your own memory thinking or getting too caught up in the situation. This will lead to the greater likelihood of your having an insight.
Become aware of your current thinking. Are you deliberately moving thoughts around? Do you have lots of thoughts running through your head? This is not uncommon. Try for a while to think about not thinking. It can be awkward, but with a little practice, it will become easier. For a few minutes, slow the stream of thoughts in your head so that you aren’t producing quite so much food for your brain to nosh on. Then, again, try to slow the thinking for an even longer stretch.
The thoughts that are constantly popping into our heads come from the combined experiences and memories of our lives. They show up unannounced and at times leave just as quickly, but when we hold on to one of these thoughts, when we feel its weight and toss it around for a bit, it tends to dominate our minds. Nothing is wrong with this, of course, if we are interested only in our past experiences, but if we are looking for a new idea, we must be able to drop these thoughts and not get wrapped up in them. As you become more aware of your thinking, discarding thoughts will become more automatic. The ability to let go of conscious thinking widens the natural spaces between thoughts so that new ideas can surface.
One oft-forgotten fact is that it takes energy to think. While practicing Insight Listening and dropping thoughts, try to simply switch off the energy that you would normally use to think. This is definitely a “less is more” methodology. Remember, our natural state is an insightful one, so strip away the nonsense, leave the thick deliberation to the past, and just be in the moment.
If you find on occasion that this just won’t work, don’t be discouraged. Everyone has times when the busy mind takes over.
Now practice dropping thoughts. As soon as you notice that you’re deliberately thinking about something, say to yourself, “I’m going to stop thinking about that.” Stop thinking about it, but don’t do so by putting another thought in its place. Don’t put anything in its place; just appreciate the moment of nothingness, however brief it may be.
Don’t concentrate too hard on any of this. A part of you knows how to do this better than your intellect, and you’re not learning how to do anything you don’t already know how to do. Instead, just throw yourself into it, and you’ll get it eventually. You’ll know you’re on the right track if you are enjoying the good feeling of the Insight State of Mind. Try it and see. You’ll develop comfort, and eventually faith, in it.
Practicing in smaller meetings with several people is great as well, provided you are careful not to look like you are daydreaming. A good strategy for this type of setting is to adopt a posture of rapt attention. One way to do this is to make deep eye contact with the person who is speaking. Another is to shift your focus between the speaker’s eyes and a strand of hair on her head. In either case, instead of trying to follow the content of what the person is saying, you should look more deeply into the feeling of what she is saying. You’ll be “listening for” the feeling of the Insight State of Mind and for insights, and the speaker will never know it.
The danger with practicing this in smaller groups is that you might get discovered. If you are asked in some way to repeat back what has just been said (“Larry, what do you think about that?”), the first thing that you want to do is pause and look for a fresh thought. If you have been daydreaming about something else entirely, it’s probably not a good idea to share that fact. Instead, the new thought that you are looking for is about the subject that the person has been speaking on (which you are subconsciously aware of, if not consciously). To avoid an awkward silence, you might state the truth. “Well, I’m just reflecting on what you were saying.” One of two things will then be true. Either you won’t have anything original to add at the moment, or you will share your fresh thought.
Practicing Insight Listening with
One Other Person
One of the most effective methods for practicing Insight Listening is to do so deliberately with one other person. In one-on-one Insight Listening, both parties are informed and fully enrolled in the process and the result is entirely different from normal conversations.
Below are some simple exercises you can practice with a friend or colleague. Video demonstrations are available on our website, TAOI Online Learning. We have found that it is generally easier to grasp the approach of TAOI when you are working with another person. On the other hand, you may find that recruiting a partner to practice with is more work than you would like to undertake right now. If this is the case, then read through the next few sections to get a sense of how these paired conversations should unfold, and then practice with an unsuspecting partner, but be sensitive to the fact that the other person isn’t in on your little game.
EXERCISE:
Listening with Nothing on Your Mind
OVERVIEW
The objective of this exercise is to be present with your partner and her thinking with as little of your own thinking going on as possible.
First, review with each other the purpose of the practice session, which is for the listener to listen with none of her own thinking going on to the extent possible. It helps to start out by taking a moment to discuss what the terms insight and fresh thought mean to you. This will help naturally point you toward an insightful state. Finally, you should take a moment to describe to each other what an Insight State of Mind feels like so that you will notice when it arrives. This important process serves to bait the hook and aim your unconscious mind in a productive direction.
THE EXERCISE
There are two roles (one speaker and one listener). Choose who will start out as the speaker, and have the listener monitor the time.
The speaker should take three minutes to describe a topic he is interested in. It can be something he is excited about, like his daughter’s soccer game, or something he’s recently enjoyed, like a movie or a new restaurant. For this exercise, it’s best not to use a problem that is inherently mood lowering. Instead, the speaker should focus on a current business or personal issue on which he would like an insight. The listener should listen with nothing on her mind. That is to say, whenever the listener has an old thought or association about the topic being described, she should drop that thought and return to Insight Listening. For the most part, the listener should stay quiet, both verbally and mentally. Many people find this to be a challenge.
It is important that both partners keep their fingers on the pulse of the feeling of the conversation. If it drifts away from a good feeling, one of them should mention this so they can find their way back.
After the three minutes is up, take a few minutes for the listener to answer the following:
• What was that like? How did it feel?
• How much of the time were you able to remain mentally quiet?
• If you got caught up in your own thoughts, what happened? How did you find your way back (if you did)?
Occasionally during this exercise, you may encounter an awkward silence. Don’t be discouraged; this is common the first time around! Soon you’ll notice that the pauses encourage Insight Listening and allow space for fresh thoughts to arrive.
Switch roles so that you each get a chance to play both roles. By the end, you should have a better handle on listening with nothing on your mind. As you progress through the rest of the exercises we share with you in this chapter, you will find this getting easier.
Distractions and Dropping Thoughts
Almost inevitably at some point, you will notice yourself having a conversation in your head. When this happens, try to set it aside and return to empty-mindedness. These internal conversations interfere with the occurrence of insight. It’s easy to get carried away by a fresh thought and go off on your own line of thinking. If you catch yourself doing this, stop and go back to listening with nothing on your mind. This may seem and often is challenging, yet we do it all the time. Imagine you are in the middle of a horrendous fight with someone when the phone rings. Are you going to pick up the phone and fight with whoever is on the line? Of course not. You switch your thinking; it’s both automatic and unconscious. Another example of this might be if you’ve just finished a troublesome phone call. Your adrenaline is still pumping and you are distraught. Perhaps you’ve hung up furious at the caller. With your next appointment waiting in the hall, you might take a minute, breathe deeply, and settle down. When you start your meeting, you might even mention how wound up you are and excuse yourself for being a bit distracted at the moment.
One manager, in the middle of a very ugly lawsuit, found himself incessantly stewing over the suit, furious at what the other party was doing and concerned with how he was going to defend himself and retaliate. On his morning walk, he noticed that he was boiling again about the lawsuit and annoyed at how it had taken over his thinking. He consciously pushed all thoughts of the suit out of his mind and committed himself to not ruining his walk by agonizing over it. Not two minutes later, he was completely consumed by these thoughts again. He recommitted to dropping all thoughts about the suit, but a few minutes later, he was caught up once again. This pattern continued for a while, and each time he would redouble his efforts, trying not to be seduced by the dialogue going on in his head. Then something odd happened. He was enjoying himself and the glorious nature around him on his walk. It had been twenty minutes or more since he had thought about the lawsuit.
To this day, he is not clear about what specifically happened in his thinking. The unwanted thinking probably wasn’t banished, but at the same time, small moments of clarity were slowly finding a beachhead, expanding at each iteration. Whatever the case, his disciplined practice seemed to be a factor. Each moment of clarity enabled him to remember that equanimity was possible, even if only fleeting. From then on, even though thoughts of the lawsuit frequently returned, they no longer gripped his thinking in the same way. Years after this occurrence, this man still gets caught up in thought storms on occasion, but he knows that they are by their very nature temporary, and so he is no longer imprisoned by them.
Incidentally, bad thoughts are not the only thing that can be distracting. Our friend Terry Ann describes how fresh thoughts can derail you as well.
My inclination can be to get swept up with fresh thoughts, even when I’m really trying to listen and be totally present in a conversation. This phenomenon is more clear and less problematic when I’m walking along the river by myself or peacefully listening to an audiobook. Suddenly, I’ve checked out of the book as thoughts tumble one after another into my mind. They’re usually new thoughts and are relevant to something I have been thinking about, and while this is a good thing, I don’t hear the book anymore, even though it’s still playing in my headphones. When the thoughts stop, I check back into the book, and I have to rewind because I have heard nothing. When I’m on my own, this is exciting and great, but when it happens in a conversation, it is not necessarily so.
Be alert to what you allow yourself to take in with your listening. You don’t have to “do” Insight Listening as much as you step back and let it occur without interfering with it. It’s like lying on the beach with nothing in particular on your mind and then something comes along that distracts you. If you get upset about being distracted, the distraction will grow, and you will wind up in a messy conversation with yourself about the distraction. Your other option is to wave as it passes by and return to your beautiful day at the beach, blissfully present.
EXERCISE:
Fresh Thought Hunt
OVERVIEW
You may be wondering when you get to listen for insights. Soon, we promise, but there’s one last thing we’d like to cover: learning to listen for fresh thoughts. In this exercise, don’t worry about whether you are having an insight or not. Just get familiar with noticing the arrival of fresh thoughts. The insights will take care of themselves. If you are focused on trying to create an insight, you are actually working your mind, and this will interfere with insight generation. Instead, get comfortable with inviting fresh thoughts in. Odds are that one of them will be an insight. The better you get at pointing your awareness in the direction of freshness and the unknown, the more likely you will hear the insight when it arrives. Video demonstrations are available on our website, TAOI Online Learning.
Listening for fresh thoughts has a certain intentionality to it, but it is not hard work like most conscious actions. It’s more akin to reading a book, watching a play, or listening to music.
PREPARATION
In this exercise, you will practice with a partner, listening for fresh thoughts. First, go over the ground rules and be clear on the purpose of the practice session, which is to generate as many fresh thoughts as possible and to notice the feeling that accompanies each when it arrives. It’s a good idea to take a moment to discuss what the terms insight and fresh thought mean to you. This naturally steers you toward an insightful state. Finally, take a moment to describe to each other what an Insight State of Mind feels like so that you will notice when it arrives.
THE EXERCISE
There are two roles (one speaker and one listener). Choose who will start out as the speaker, and have the listener monitor the time.
The speaker should describe to the listener a current business or personal issue on which he would like an insight. Take only two minutes to describe the situation; more time than this will get in the way. While the listener listens, she should do so with nothing on her mind. That is to say, whenever an old thought or association about the topic arises, it should be dropped, and the listener should return to Insight Listening.
Part 2
At this point, the speaker will go on a Fresh Thought Hunt. For three minutes, the speaker, to the best of his ability, should voice only fresh thoughts about the situation as they arise. This generally means that there will be lengthy pauses, followed by short phrases. This may feel a bit unusual as the cadence will be nothing like a normal conversation. Still, the speaker ground rules are simple: you are either voicing a fresh thought on the topic, or you are listening with nothing on your mind, looking for a thought that you have never had before.
During part 2, the listener should listen with nothing on her mind and notice when something strikes her as fresh. It might be something the speaker has said, but it might also be something that she has never thought before. In either case, a mental note should be made that something fresh happened. If something the speaker says strikes the listener as fresh, she might acknowledge it out loud (“Wow, that sounded really fresh”). This can help encourage the speaker, but for the most part, the listener should remain silent.
It is important that both partners keep their fingers on the pulse of the feeling of the conversation so that when it drifts away from a good feeling, one of them can mention this and they can find their way back.
Part 3
Once the speaker has concluded his three-minute Fresh Thought Hunt, together the partners should talk about what that experience was like. Both the speaker and the listener should share the items that they felt were fresh thoughts.
The three parts form one complete round of a Fresh Thought Hunt. If you like, at this point you can switch roles and repeat the exercise.
KEEP IN MIND
By the end of this exercise, you should have a pretty good idea of what a fresh thought feels like, and you should have further developed your ability to listen with nothing on your mind. Here’s how it might look: You are listening to the speaker with nothing on your mind and feeling quiet, passive, reflective, and uncritical. You will likely enjoy what he has to say. When he says something fresh, you will feel it. It may not be an insight but if it is new for either of you, you will at least notice a difference from typical thought. Something behind what is being said will affect you. At this point, you will feel a pull to start actively thinking about what has just been said; avoid this and return to a quiet mind. Once again a fresh thought will appear, and you will get impacted. This will continue for the duration of the exercise, and at some point, one of you may have a genuine insight.
EXERCISE:
Coaching for Fresh Thoughts and Insights
OVERVIEW
This exercise builds on the previous two and has two objectives. The first is for the speaker to have some fresh thoughts about something he is interested in. The second is for the listener to learn to coach and otherwise help the speaker have more fresh thoughts. Watch a video demonstration on our website, TAOI Learning Online.
PREPARATION
In this exercise, you will practice with a partner once again, this time listening for fresh thoughts and coaching for fresh thoughts. First, go over the ground rules and be clear on the purpose of the practice session. Also, before you begin, take a moment to describe to each other what an Insight State of Mind feels like so that you will notice when it arrives.
THE EXERCISE
There are two roles (one speaker and one listener). Choose who will start out as the speaker and have the listener monitor the time.
Part 1
The speaker should take two minutes to describe something he would like some fresh thought on or insight into. The listener should listen with nothing on her mind. This sets the stage.
Part 2
The speaker now has four minutes to go on a Fresh Thought Hunt to look more deeply into what he wants. The listener will be the speaker’s coach. She will again be listening with nothing on her mind as best she can.
The two parts form one complete round of the Coaching for Fresh Thoughts and Insights exercise. If you like, at this point you can switch roles and repeat the exercise.
KEEP IN MIND
Above all, when you’re the listener/coach, you want to maintain rapport and be very careful of anything that feels confronting or that might add any sort of pressure on the speaker. You want to encourage the speaker to discover a new, fresh perspective on his desires. It’s quite okay to ask questions about the speaker’s thinking (“Was that a memory or a fresh thought?”), and it’s also helpful to acknowledge when something the speaker says strikes you as fresh. You can offer a thought if it is truly fresh, but generally, coaching should be used sparingly.
Stay away from questions about the content or the specifics of the situation. Getting consumed in the content of the speaker’s words will impede your ability to be helpful and spark insights. You may have been able to recite all the facts he had given you, and you may even be able to give him some advice or even your best answer for the situation, but there likely would have been no insight.
Don’t screen the speaker’s words with your intellect, or else you will screen the feeling out and probably the insights along with it. The practice of Insight Listening requires tuning in to what lies beyond the speaker’s words. What is he really communicating? The feeling of the conversation is as important as its content.
Do not offer anything that remotely resembles advice. Do not try to solve the speaker’s problem or offer solutions of your own, no matter how good your idea may be. You can do that after the exercise is over. When you try to solve a problem, more often than not, you are consciously accessing memory and trying to fit pieces together. Perhaps more importantly, you are working within the framing your partner has provided you. You want to avoid that kind of limit. You might end up offering a fresh thought that’s out of left field and seemingly irrelevant, but it might be just the thing that triggers an important insight in your partner.
You may need to gently interrupt the speaker if he goes off on a memory-based thought train. You might say something like, “Pause for just a second, Jim.” Here are other phrases you might find helpful: “Give me another fresh thought about that.” “What’s another way of looking at this?” “What’s a question you have about that?” “I’m wondering what you are thinking right now.” And our personal favorite: “If you weren’t thinking whatever you’re thinking right now, what would you be thinking?”
Even though you are not deliberately listening to the content, you will often realize that the speaker has related certain facts that seem at odds with each other. If you gently ask about the contradiction, he too may see the discrepancy, which may be at the root of his inability to find a solution. Often the challenge is not in the reality of the situation but in how it’s being thought of. Or you may pick up on what seems to you to be a missing piece to the puzzle, and by mentioning the missing piece, the speaker can make new connections and follow a fresh train of thought.
Imagine for a moment that you are the listener/coach and your partner is a few minutes into reporting the details of his situation. As he is describing the complexity that makes the problem hard to solve, you listen without paying close attention to the details or content. Instead of the content of his description, what registers inside you is his frustration. When you mention this fact, your partner feels somehow relieved. He says, “Gee, that’s right. Thanks for seeing that.” The rapport between you increases, and his mind settles down. The subject of the conversation has actually changed. The listener might ask, “Well, what do you think about that frustration?” Hopefully, something will occur to the speaker that mitigates his frustration, and if you’re lucky, he may have a lasting insight into his original problem.
The amount of conversation management depends very much on the context and aim of the conversation. When listening this way with his children, one colleague sits down, connects, and listens deeply for whatever comes to him. To the extent that he has an agenda, it’s only to be with the children, not to look for an insight. When he’s on a business call with a client who has a specific problem, then the goal is absolutely to look for an insight. Listening with that in mind, he will frame the conversation and question based on whatever feels fresh and relevant in that moment.
Insight Listening Conversations
Now you have the basics of how to listen for insights and how to help others have more insights. You may have gathered by now that conducting conversations with such a limited structure doesn’t require much management at all. The key is to keep a good feeling and let your wisdom take over. Your goal is never to solve the other person’s problem. It’s his issue, and you should be appreciating and reinforcing his insights more than your own. You will of course still have some of your own fresh thoughts, and occasionally they will be insights. Primarily, you are listening to him, however. When you are open and interested, your partner is most likely to have an insight. Don’t consciously think about what you’re doing. When you are connected to your deepest wisdom, you will operate on autopilot. You will know when to speak and when to be silent (which should be most of the time). You will soon discover that both what you do and what you don’t do are of equal importance. When you speak, you won’t be rehearsing or overthinking what you say. Instead, your speech should feel quiet, reflective, and spontaneous, as if the words were traveling through you. This manner of speaking will elevate your rapport with the person. In fact, the more you speak this way, in any setting, the more people will be drawn to hearing what you have to say.
Our friend Ed likes to describe a camping trip with his family when his son asked him to go fishing with him. The thing is, Ed doesn’t fish. His job, as he describes it, was to sit quietly next to his son as his son fished because that helped his son. All his son wanted him to do was to sit there. He says, “There is something about presence that helps us find the fish.”
Because the listener is in a reflective, uncritical state, she hears more deeply than she might otherwise and is able to see the essence of the problem being expressed. Not only that, but because she isn’t hung up in intellectual thinking, she is free to have deep insights that either solve the problem or help her partner see it in a completely new light. A deep insight into a problem permanently changes the way we look at it, and when we have a new perspective, a clear solution will present itself, often in days or even hours.
Content listening, too, may result only in an able recitation of the facts and perhaps even some sound advice based on past experience, but it is less likely to generate any real insight into the problem.
With Insight Listening, whether you’re the speaker or the listener, your mind is free to operate like a radio that doesn’t care about what station it’s receiving. Authors and coaches Richard Carlson and Joseph Bailey describe it this way:
It’s receiving all the incoming data without analyzing, processing, or rejecting it. In free-flowing mode you don’t interpret from a belief system, you don’t judge, and you don’t anticipate what will be said next. You simply listen nonjudgmentally, trying to take in what the other person is saying.… You allow yourself to be affected by the essence of what the other person is saying—not by the words but by the feelings behind the words.… You are not distracted with other thoughts or memories that have been triggered by the conversation. You have no agenda, no expectations, no outcome in mind.1
You would think that looking beyond the words would hamper your ability to remember what has been said, but because your subconscious discerns what is most important, you are actually able to recall the most crucial points. You might think you would succumb to boredom, but if you are fully present and not caught up in your own thoughts, you will find what your partner is saying is very interesting. If you don’t find the person engaging, then it’s not him; it’s your thinking. One consequence of Insight Listening is that you become far more likely to enjoy what the other is saying. Because you are no longer preoccupied by your own thoughts and agenda, you become absorbed in the spirit of what is being said, which—without fail—is more interesting than what you would have heard otherwise.
Insight Listening with a Person
Unfamiliar with Insight Listening
Now let’s deal with TAOI in the real world. You will, of course, use everything that you’ve learned in the previous exercises. With someone who has experience in TAOI, you can simply employ the methods overtly, while focusing on questions that you both are interested in.
The Art of Insight When You Are Seeking an Insight
When you are working with someone who is unfamiliar with TAOI and your aim is to look for your own insights, you need to keep a few things in mind. The approach is similar to the one used when you were practicing Insight Listening in a small group. Your aim should be mindful attention, listening with nothing on your mind. You want to look for the good feeling and, of course, listen for your own fresh thoughts. Don’t worry about your partner being disturbed by the fact that you have nothing on your mind. Expect instead that quite the opposite will occur. Invariably, your partner will feel more deeply listened to than in other conversations. That being said, your partner may be puzzled by the frequency with which you choose to pause and reflect, particularly if this hasn’t been your speaking style in the past. If you have good rapport with your partner, you will sense this and might find it appropriate to explain what you are doing and why, particularly if you feel that your listening is somehow hindering your partner’s experience.
There is a very good chance, if not almost certainty, that your partner will start to give you advice. As you probably now know, this won’t feel good, and you won’t like it as compared to the feeling and quality of the conversations you had in the exercises. Some people never really enjoy the experience of getting advice, even when they recognize the potential value in the solutions being offered. We hope that with practice, you will see why a conversation full of fresh thoughts is so different.
Be prepared. It’s going to be a challenge to deal with the good ideas born largely from memory about what you should do in your situation. Some of them might actually be good ideas and even fresh for you. But others, perhaps most of them, will feel stale and, if you’re not careful, can diminish whatever good feeling you may currently be enjoying. Don’t let this happen! You know the feeling you’d like to have. Let your thinking be gentle, and maintain your equanimity.
We’d like to promise that if you are mentally quiet enough, eventually your partner will settle down and stop offering advice, but we all know people who tend to live in their heads. You notice them because they think and talk very fast, and you feel you have to think and talk very fast to keep up with them. When these folks walk out of your office, their fast-talking, busy mind-set doesn’t stop and probably won’t unless it gets some attention. One time, Malcolm sat in dead silence for forty-five minutes quietly listening to a colleague advise him on what to do with a situation he had just described.
I was perfectly happy as I listened, and after about ten minutes or so, I got really interested in how long this guy could continue. I figured that if I stayed in a good state of mind, for sure I’d have an insight or two, but I never did. Finally after forty-five minutes of not having said a single word or offering a hint of encouraging body language, I called a halt to it by shifting the topic. I’m sure that he would have gone on much longer. The good news was that I was still in a good place. It had been a great experiment and solid practice on maintaining my Insight State of Mind.
As a general rule, this sort of session is hardly a good use of time for either individual. You should gently interrupt the conversation and put it back on the track of sharing fresh thoughts. Try asking the person to offer a solution that he has never thought of before, something outside his usual approach. Try other ways to steer him into fresh thought territory. Although not ideal, some situations call for you to be directive and to gently but firmly steer the conversation. You have a right to do this since this conversation is presumably about helping you, and you should specify what you want and need. In this case, only fresh thoughts!
TAOI When You Are Trying to Help Someone Have an Insight
If your purpose is to help facilitate an insight for a partner who is not aware that you are using Insight Thinking, the approach is not much different from the previously discussed exercise where two people are looking for insights together. The trick is to focus the conversation on getting your partner to generate as much fresh thought as possible, while avoiding ideas that have been said in the past. During the conversation, you may find it helpful to interrupt your partner if she is getting caught up in her memory and ask her directly for a fresh thought that she has not considered before. If you listen insightfully and maintain good rapport, you will find that your presence will be a strong catalyst for her insights. While she might initially be confused at the tack you are taking, she will quickly start to generate new ideas. If your partner gets stuck, then you can offer a fresh thought of your own. It will illustrate what a fresh thought looks like, and it will be an example of the feeling that accompanies the Insight State of Mind. Your partner may feel helped by the thought itself, or it may serve to trigger her own fresh thought or unblock a mental logjam. As with all these exercises, the key is to always maintain rapport.
Insight Listening to Yourself
So far, we’ve focused on Insight Listening with others. Let’s begin by acknowledging that going on an insight hunt when you have no one to play with can be more difficult. That said, a number of things can help you have insights while you are on your own.
As we have stressed, you want to be looking for the feeling associated with your Insight State of Mind. Occasionally, a run or relaxed shower will be just what you need to set the stage. You want to stay in that easygoing, curious state, alert for incoming insights. The challenge is to be mindful of either the absence or the presence of the good feeling. It’s not necessary to plan much beyond this, but with a bit of diligent practice, maintaining this state will become easier to the point that it becomes normal. Remember that you are on an insight hunt and you can always use intuition to direct your next step on that hunt.
When writing, you can either be analytic—rearranging ideas and words, editing sentences, and constructing arguments—or use free association, a journaling approach, and stream of consciousness. When praying or meditating, you can either follow strict rituals—reciting scripture or actively praying for a specific purpose—or have a reflective conversation with your inner wisdom or higher power and invite it in. When engaged in strenuous physical activity or a leisurely stroll on the beach, you can be either mentally active or mentally idle. When talking to yourself, you can engage either in active self-talk with intentional visualization or a contemplative conversation between you and yourself. While insights can happen in either one or the other of these modes in each case, they will happen more readily in the latter.
One important distinction to be made is that it is absolutely possible to hold something in your attention without doing any mental work on it. If you’re looking out the window at a beautiful vista, you’re very likely not counting the trees or comparing the shades of the rocks; you are simply looking at the scene. If you are on a walk, you may be conscious of obstacles on the ground, but these remain in the background of your thinking unless the obstacles become dangerous or suddenly relevant. When you take a shower, you are executing a series of tasks, but for the most part they don’t take much active thinking. You are largely present and aware, and although you may be doing some low-level thinking, it isn’t hard work, and you don’t have to do anything with these thoughts. Instead, your mind is in a clear, gentle, fertile state, ready for something new to appear.
In all these settings, you are listening for an insight. The idea is not to actively grasp at insights but to softly invite them in. It may help to hold the subject in your attention, but don’t try to do anything with it. If you get a thought about the subject, just let the thought flow by. Don’t deliberately build on it and make it into another thought, which would only serve to set off what we call a train of thought. If the thought seems to build organically on its own accord, then perhaps allow this to happen, but don’t go out of your way to try to make this happen. If another thought pops up, let that one flow by, too. Put all your mental tools back in their drawers; nothing is needed to work on the topic. The subject is simply there, nothing more. At a minimum, this experience will be very restful, even if you don’t get any insights.
For many of us, the gears of our thinking are so well polished that when they are grinding, they don’t make that much noise. We think that we are being reflective when actually our mental motor is revved up—just very quietly. When nothing insightful shows up, we have a tendency to fabricate something with quiet analytical thinking that looks to us like reflection but in fact is something else entirely. This is why for many, if not most, of us, learning to listen for insights on our own can be challenging. Listening for insights requires diligence and may be a lot easier to learn with others because then less dueling occurs with our own internal mechanisms. The better you get at this practice with other people, the more quickly your capacity and sensitivity will leak into your ability to listen to yourself.
Some people are more inclined to have insights when they walk in the woods or are otherwise by themselves in the outdoors. Other people are more inclined to have insights during conversations with other people when there is abundant activity. There is no reason to believe that one instance is any better than the other, but the question for you is, what is going on in the moment? Are you in a mentally bound mind-set, or are you open and easygoing?
Remember that none of these rules is hard and fast. Sometimes you might feel the need to deliberately build on a thought you just had, and this might be precisely what is needed in that moment. The fact is, when you are unpressured in your thinking, you exert mental muscles mindfully, not habitually, and you will know the difference by the way it feels.
All of us have our own kinds of internal dialogues: some of them lead to insights, and some of them don’t. Here’s an example from one of our clients:
When I’m actively thinking about a topic, it actually seems like I’m in a conversation with myself in my head. Sometimes it shows up as two people talking, both of whom are me, with a third me sitting on the side, listening to the other two mes talk to each other. This resembles the friendly question-and-answer that occurs in the kind of conversation described in the earlier Insight Listening exercises between two people. The questioner asks some questions, makes observations about how the other me is thinking about the topic, and often spots contradictions in either the thinking or in the data. It’s rather like the second me is helping the first me think better, with the third me observing it all.
A second mode I’ve noticed is when the conversation becomes more like a conversation between me and somebody else who’s both me and beyond me. People of faith will recognize this capacity, although this is more like questions and explorations with a friend than perhaps receiving truth or wisdom from a higher source. I use this mode when writing. I ask, “What do you think about that?” and “What else have you said that you think is important?” Fresh thoughts tumble out, although, of course, not all are immediate insights. In both of these modes, the questions serve to push my thinking into the not known, the still undefined, either directly or by freshly questioning things that I think I know but may well not be true.
Of course, different people talk about these mental conversations in different terms. One of the most common is the “little voice in one’s head.” But people often don’t distinguish more than one voice being active at the same time. Malcolm talks about having a “heady” voice that is loaded with intellectual content and an “insight voice” that to him seems to emerge from the ether. For him, there are not two voices together. His normal talking with himself is displaced by the “insight me” coming from the unknown. A lot of people have described their mental conversations along these lines. Yet another way we’ve heard this described is that thought is forming from a kind of word-free darkness. From that darkness an image starts to form, and at first you see something that isn’t quite clear. Then as you continue to look, a moment comes when it becomes clear and you are able to describe what you are seeing. In this case, it’s about getting an inkling that sharpens into focus over a relatively short period of time. Ultimately, what you find yourself doing is trying to describe in words what you have seen.
You may have a completely different way of describing these conversations in your head, and you may not relate to these descriptions at all. We don’t think there is much value in considering any of this too much, except to say that it may be useful for you to be mindful of your preferred style. While you don’t want to overplan or overmanage, it can help to be deliberate and to carve out uninterrupted time for each mode so that you can listen insightfully to each voice. Without this deliberate intention, the world can quickly crowd out any time you might have had to operate in your preferred insightful state.
Listening for insight is simply about being present and reflective. It’s a very natural, maybe even our most natural, way of listening, but it can be a bit awkward for many of us to empty the chatter in our heads and look instead for fresh thoughts. We have to recover our ability to drop distractions, allow the detailed content of the words to fall away, and instead, absorb the feeling of the communication, whether it be with another person or only with ourselves.
When we listen for fresh thoughts in this manner, insights ultimately hit.
All the discussions in this chapter on strategy and method really only make sense if you quiet your mind. You are not so much employing techniques as you are lightly observing your listening and thinking. Over time, this way of listening becomes spontaneous with insights happening all the time—we need only notice them.