Hold Your Seat: Dialogue Is 2-Way
The understanding conversation is the one that some senior-level managers and executives dislike. A VP in a financial firm once asked me, “Why should I ask people who work for me to give me input on a plan? Won’t they think I don’t know what I’m doing?”
The difficulty is that it is a dialogue, with listening – and maybe even accepting on what the other person says – a key ingredient. Talking is easy and quick. Listening takes time and attention. Plus, whenever you really listen, sometimes you have to change your mind about whatever you were thinking at the beginning of the conversation. Maybe that’s what people don’t like about it.
A Tibetan lama, Sakyong Mipham, makes some important points about listening in a recent article in the Shambhala Sun:
- True listening is not always easy. It is a skill we develop.
- For a genuine dialogue to occur, speaking and listening must both play leading roles.
- The best way to practice listening is to learn to “hold your seat”.
Hold your seat. When you’re listening, he says that power has been handed over to the speaker, who will now direct the conversation’s mood and content. When you are listening, you hold your seat by calmly refraining from interrupting, by being engaged and self-assured, and allowing someone else to take charge. If it’s hard to stay present and really hear the other person, try taking a gentle in-and-out breath or shifting your posture in some way, uncrossing your arms or dropping your shoulders. Bring yourself back to listening.
When you want to engage people in accepting something – say, a plan of action or a suggestion – you can’t just hand them the plan, ask them to read it, and believe they will adopt it as their own. You’ll need a dialogue, and a willingness to accept the others’ input as useful. You might even change your mind about something. Learning and updating our ideas is what understanding conversations are all about.