Enhance Your Skills: Listening Someone Into Existence

Today we’ll focus on how to listen to someone so that they feel truly understood and seen.

And it may not be a kind of listening that you know about. It’s a method called “affect labeling” – meaning labeling the emotions of the person you’re listening to. And our expert today is Doug Noll, who teaches this method all over the world.

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Active listening…

Active listening has been applauded as the cornerstone of conflict resolution techniques since its introduction by psychologist Carl Rogers in 1957. It’s also been called “reflective listening” and was a technique that Rogers taught, many began using, and many actually misunderstood and misused.

Many have been finding that this method isn’t as effective as it was originally reported to be, often resulting in its practitioners (consciously or otherwise) appearing manipulative, artificial, or condescending. I think Rogers would say that this is an overly-simplistic misunderstanding of what he called reflective listening – and that the job of the listener is to understand the world from the speaker’s point of view – as well as to lean into some of the more subtle emotions or meanings that the speaker or client shows.

So it’s not simply parroting back to the speaker or client what you heard them say, as many a spoof of the technique have shown… And certainly not what Carl Rogers had in mind.

Listening someone into existence…

So, if active listening isn’t the be-all-end-all of diffusing tension, then what is?

Professional high-conflict mediator Doug Noll has developed a highly effective, award-winning technique for calming volatile situations nearly instantaneously. Grounded in neuroscience and honed in maximum-security prisons, C-Suites, and the halls of Congress, Noll’s de-escalation method, which he refers to as “Listening Someone into Existence,” allows cooler heads to prevail so that conflict can be navigated productively.

Listening as taught by Doug Noll…

Doug has a really interesting history and way he came into this field – from trial lawyer into becoming a professional trainer in listening, peace-making, and conflict-management.

Here’s a snippet of our conversation about his work with maximum security prison inmates who’d asked him and his partner to teach them their method – so that they could help other inmates de-escalate conflict.

Doug:
“I think that’s what we saw in our prison work, is we saw the same thing, the gratitude of these people who have killed people. Have had horrible lives, horrible upbringings. Murderers are not born, they’re bred. And the gratitude that we took the time as two well-known lawyers to teach them foundational skills of life that changed everything for them. And recognized them for who they were, and allowed them to regain their own humanity, and then begin to recognize the humanity in the people around them on prison yards. And that’s what dropped the violence.”

“There was a woman, Sarah, in our class. And we walk into this dingy conference room in the middle of this maximum security prison, and she’s in the, sitting in, over in the corner quietly sobbing. And we go up to her, and Laurel kneels next to her and says, “What’s going on?” And Sarah tells us this story.

She says, “I’ve been in prison for 18 years. I’m serving a 25 to life because I killed a family of four as an addicted alcoholic drunk driver. And I came away from that accident unscathed. I had to give up my three-year-old son to my sister to raise, and I’ve written him every single week for 18 years.”

“He’s never called. He’s never visited. He’s never written back.”

“Last week, I decided to write a different kind of a letter. I decided to use what you guys have been teaching me about naming emotions. And I thought about all of the feelings he must feel having an addicted alcoholic killer as a mother. And I wrote him that letter. And today, for the first time in 18 years, I received a letter back from him. And at the end of the letter, he said, ‘Mom, I love you. I’m bringing my girlfriend. We’ll come visit you in three weeks.'”