Radical Listening
I had a chat with positive psychology coaching pioneers Robert Biswas-Diener and Christian van Nieuwerburgh about how to truly listen.
I had a really great chat with positive psychology coaching pioneers Robert Biswas-Diener and Christian van Nieuwerburgh about the art and science of truly listening. Together they are authors of the new book “Radical Listening: The Art of True Connection”.
In this episode we discuss the power of true listening, teaching listeners how to actively co-create meaning and connection with anyone. They present their framework for radical listening, which includes the art and science of noticing, quieting, accepting, acknowledging, questioning, and interjecting. I really enjoyed this conversation with two people who I hugely respect. In fact, I consider both of them important mentors of mine in the coaching profession. What the world needs right now is more true listening, so I was glad to speak with them.
You can listen to the full episode here.
Thanks for this conversation. I've been reading Radical Listening off and on for the past two weeks. It doesn't matter what page I open to, I always get a gem of an insight or reframe that helps me keep learning a set of lifelong skills. With a mastermind group this past week, with Radical Listening in mind, in fact, I led them through an exercise for deep listening and to reflect on what qualities they embody when fully present and listening. It seemed to lead to one of our most magical mastermind spotlights.
Yeah, whatever happened to active listening? :)
I wonder if we struggle to teach active, or radical, or whatever you call it listening is because what we effectively are trying to teach is the art of understanding. And while we humans can learn many things by observing other people doing it, the capacity to understand is not one of those things.
By showing other people how we do it, we often end up teaching them to imitate it. I think this happens a lot with psychology majors.