Listening to others means being attentive to what they have to say, and giving them space, time and freedom to do so, as well as presence, empathy and patience. It’s about welcoming the thoughts and worries of the person expressing themselves, offering them hospitality.
Listening to others also means being attentive to what they would like to say and communicate through their emotions, expression, movements and other signs. Listening to others can contribute to peaceful relationships.
True listening is an asceticism in the true sense of the word: you have to practice it to perfect yourself.
Welcoming speech implies that the listener :
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the ability to detach oneself from one’s own preoccupations in order to receive those of the other person (decentralization)
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a minimum of self-confidence, so as not to feel threatened by the other person’s words.
In return, this quality of listening allows the other person to feel respected, to express himself and to deepen his thoughts without fear of judgment.
The development of this type of listening in our society (through training at school, for example) would facilitate the establishment of a climate of trust, help defuse everyday conflicts, both at home and at work, and contribute to the pacification of human relations.
The concept of this kind of listening, also known as benevolent listening, derives from the work of American psychologist Carl Rogers. It involves silently welcoming, sometimes for a long time, the emotions and feelings expressed or not verbalized by the speaker, then helping him or her to clarify them within him or herself, on the one hand through sensitive reformulation (formulating in a different, natural way what the person has just expressed), and above all through suggestive, delicate and benevolent questioning, carried out in small steps.
In a more dynamic dialogue, active listening consists in showing the other person that you are listening – through your attitude, your gaze, your silence when the other person is speaking, and then through rephrasing in the form of questions. Listening is all the more difficult when you have a differing opinion, and emotions run high. In active listening during polemical dialogue, however, it is always possible to say that you hear the opposing message and why, but that you disagree, and why.
Good listening is a useful tool for calming emotional debates. In an exchange of divergent opinions, if there is no active mutual listening, there is no real dialogue, only monologues that clash in a battle of decibels!