Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.
—ALAN ALDA
I FIRST HEARD the word receive used as a form of listening when I watched Julian Treasure’s viral TED Talk, “5 Ways to Listen Better.”1 His formula for listening is RASA, which stands for receive, appreciate, summarize, and ask. When I deliver one-or two-day Courageous Coaching workshops for leaders, I teach them this formula as a way to use a coaching approach in their leadership conversations. They do exercises to experience what fully receiving and appreciating the talker’s perspective feels like. Most admit they struggled with not jumping in to give advice, but the concept of receiving without judgment and appreciating the person’s experience helped the leaders stay present. Then, adding in the requirement to summarize and ask only clarifying questions forces them to focus their attention on the person they are listening to.
The act of receiving means you take in what clients offer you. You hear their words, notice their shifts in expression and posture, catch the subtle shifts in emotion, and sense when there is something they haven’t said. When you accept and honor people for who they are and what they are experiencing, they are more likely to open up and explore with you.
In your daily interactions, the intention behind listening is usually to gain information that will fulfill your needs. You keep your distance from the other person by staying in your head, even when you say your intention is to collaborate. The person feels little connection with you when you part.
You listen to people for these purposes:
Listening to people requires you to use cognitive awareness. You seek to understand what people are saying, interpreting what you hear.
You might notice emotional shifts in their expression, but your tendency will be to analyze their reactions, even though it is hard to accurately decipher facial expressions.2 Far more is going on in any interaction than what people are saying and perceptibly expressing.
Using only cognitive awareness focuses on collecting data to understand clients’ story from their point of view. Cognitive listening often leads to diagnosing problems to find solutions. The coaching skims the surface in search of options and consequences.
When you choose to be present and connect with someone, you listen beyond your analytical brain. You open your nervous system to receive with your heart and gut as well as with your open mind. The person feels heard, valued, and possibly transformed as a result.3
Receiving requires you to suspend analysis. You take in and accept people’s words, expressions, and emotions as elements of their experience. You acknowledge the story they offer as valid from their current point of view. You don’t insert your opinions or judgments.
You receive what people offer for these purposes:
Receiving is an active, not passive, act. To fully receive, you need to be aware of your sensory reactions as well as your mental activity. With sensory awareness, you can receive and discern what is going on with others beyond the words they speak.
Sensory awareness includes an inward awareness of your reactions in a conversation. Your reactions might be in response to what clients tell you. You also might be reacting to what you energetically receive from them.
You can sense people’s desires, disappointments, needs, frustrations, hopes, and doubts when they can’t or have trouble articulating these experiences themselves. This requires you to access all three processing centers of the nervous system—your brain, heart, and gut. A visualization on how to open all three of these processing centers is presented in the exercise at the end of this chapter.
Being sensitive doesn’t mean being wishy-washy. It means you are aware of what is going on around you on a sensory level. You can sense when people are conflicted, distressed, or stimulated. Most people claim their pets have this uncanny ability to sense their emotional needs. Humans can receive these emotional vibrations as well. We just don’t pay attention to them.
You were likely taught to ignore your sensory awareness as a part of your conditioning as a child. Were you ever told, “You shouldn’t take things so personally” or “You should toughen up”? This led you to rely on your cognitive brain for listening and interpreting meaning.
When you don’t allow people to get under your skin, you aren’t experiencing them fully. You are disconnected internally and externally. You put up a wall between yourself and the people you are with.
I’m often asked if venturing into the land of emotions is risky, especially at work. I hear, “I can’t allow people’s emotions to sway me.” The business world is full of aphorisms that declare, “Only the tough survive.”
You can gain some understanding of what clients are experiencing by noticing their body language and voice, but you gain a deeper awareness when you pick up the emotional energy vibrating between you.5 You might feel this energy in your heart or gut. You grasp when clients want you to back off and give them space, quietly standing by. You know when they are impatient to move on or if they want to spend more time on a topic. You can tell when they just want to be heard or if they want to be acknowledged for doing the best they can with what they have right now. You might feel their stress, anxiety, and anger in your body.
If you let these emotions sit in your body, you won’t be able to effectively coach. Empathy is where you receive what another is feeling using sensory awareness, but when coaching, you need to let these sensations pass through you. As described in chapter 4, you can then experience nonreactive empathy. You share what you saw, heard, and felt with your clients. If you felt their emotion, you relax your body and let the emotion subside as you return to being fully present with them.
Practice aligning your brain to stay present with curiosity, care, and the belief in clients’ potential. Receive what they offer without analysis or judgment. Share what you receive. Release the emotions you sensed they felt. Your presence encourages connection, safety, and the openness to discover a new way forward together.
Practice these steps for keeping your brain clear while coaching. You will be able to clearly receive your clients’ words and expressions and offer them back for their consideration:
A. H. Almaas said, “Therefore, the more accustomed we are to the inner stillness and peacefulness, the more perceptive we become on the subtle dimensions. This can take our inquiry to deeper levels, to a newer kind of knowledge, to a different kind of experience.”6
The following visualization exercise will help you open your head, heart, and gut before your next conversation. Pause between the steps.
After your next coaching session, consider if you had a difficult time accessing one part of the nervous system. I’ve heard, “I can do the gut, but listening to my heart feels awkward” and “I am always listening with my heart. Sharing what I sense from my gut feels scary.” People who tend to be helpers listen more easily from their heart than their gut. Risk-takers who move quickly on instinct find it easier to listen from their gut than their heart. In your daily interactions, practice receiving from your most vulnerable place to balance the three large organs of your nervous system. This practice will help you open and align your entire nervous system when coaching.