A response to Charlie Mable’s blog post entitled “See, Listen, Reflect” Link to Blog Post:
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your blog post and especially loved your question and comment about listening and empathy.
How can there be empathy without first actively listening with understanding? The adage comes up that we have one mouth and two ears and should spend twice as much time listening as speaking.
You didn’t just say listening, (which is a verb itself) but you added the word “actively” to define even further that leaders need to intentionally listen to others in order to understand. The other day, I was chatting with someone about a particularly moving and sad story and at one point they accidentally responded “cool”. They quickly realized that the response of “cool” didn’t come remotely close to being applicable and they apologized for not really listening and being distracted. We laughed about it and moved on. However, if I had been a student, sharing something deeply personal, this interaction might have caused me to never want to share again. It was a good reminder to this individual and to myself, the need to put our phones down, to ignore the dings of our email and to focus intentionally and listen actively. How many times have we missed something important due to a lack of actively and intentionally listening? How many opportunities to connect were lost because we were too focused on ourselves?
You raised another great question at the bottom of your post:
Do you agree that having a reflective practice increases and is important for awareness?
Yes, I completely 100% agree that having a reflective practice is important in order to become more aware. When things go wrong especially, it is often easy to find excuses or become defensive. However, I truly believe that we grow the most by being reflective and thinking about how we can improve things for next time. It’s not about beating ourselves up over something, but rather acknowledging the good, the bad and the ugly and learning from them so that we can add these experiences to our tool kit. We will have a much better perspective and the foresight on how to do things differently/better when similar situations crop up again.
Thank you for stimulating some reflection of my own after reading your post!
I appreciate your response and agree with your statement;
‘It’s not about beating ourselves up over something, but rather acknowledging the good, the bad and the ugly and learning from them so that we can add these experiences to our tool kit. We will have a much better perspective and the foresight on how to do things differently/better when similar situations crop up again.’
I think it takes courage to really examine myself/ourselves in some situations and look for better outcomes, or just to remind myself to take a second to acknowledge and then respond. Important to just ask a question to clarify instead of jumping to the wrong conclusion. Also, as I show grace to others I should allow grace for myself. I am a work in progress.