“There are three levels of listening,” Kate explains from the front of the conference room. “The first level is what we call ‘internal listening,’ meaning, the listener is only thinking about how what they are hearing relates back to them.” I’m clenching my jaw, a habit that I seemed to have picked up on the DC roads. I’m hoping that I’m doing a good job. I’m just sitting there, but I hope I’m doing it well. “The second level of listening,” Kate continues, “is called ‘focused listening. ‘ At this level, the listener is actually paying attention to what the speaker is saying.” I glance around the room. All the participants seem to be paying attention. Do they need anything? How is the air in the room? Too hot? I could turn up the AC. I try to be silent as I slip over to the thermostat. A few of the suits glance my way but quickly look away again, as if they barely register my presence. Good. “The third level of listening,” Kate goes on, “is called ‘universal listening,’ meaning that the listener is not only paying attention to what the speaker is saying, but they can also sense what isn’t being said; they can read the emotion between the words.” I slide back into my seat, head down, jaw clenched.
When I moved to Washington, DC, after graduating from CSU in 2016, I couldn’t tell you what I was moving there for. Sure, in the simplest terms, I was moving there for a job. What that job was, however, was as new to me as the endless web of intersecting metro lines and the gridlocked traffic. I was going to work at a “leadership development firm,” but really, I just needed a job.
“Essentially,” I said to my friend over a beer in Chinatown, the commuters rushing by like ants outside the windows, “it means that we’re trying to make horrible bosses into better people.” This was the long and short of it. Unsurprisingly, the world is filled with a variety of bad leaders. At my company, we were trying to teach them to be better. My job was to “support the learning.” Aka: Logistics.
On my duties list: Check that the AV in our event spaces worked, ensure the seating arrangement was correct, order lunch, order coffee, print out materials, scan the room and make sure everything ran smoothly. If no one noticed anything amiss then it was a job well done. In many ways, it was a crash-course in details. In other ways, it was a lesson in paying attention.
I spent hours sitting in glass-paneled meeting rooms, surrounded by leaders at the top of their game, listening to lessons which, at first, seemed too basic for the caliber of the audience. They were being taught to listen? Really? Isn’t listening just…innate? But overtime, just as Kate predicted, instead of just listening to what the facilitators were saying, I started to really hear them.
Now, after eight years spent in the professional development space, I’m thrilled to be a student again. Thrilled to be out of Washington, DC (sorry). Delighted to have a backpack and a reading list, even when, by week four it feels hard to keep up. But, I feel like I’ve come back to campus with a brand new understanding of what it means to be a student. A lot of my personal development has been impacted by my professional development.
So, here are three lessons I am trying to incorporate into this next chapter as a student:
- Don’t just listen, hear. In many ways, being a student is like being in a constant conversation. The professors speak, they ask you to respond; you speak, your peers listen; your peers respond, you listen. Yet, we all know that there are so many ways to not listen. In a busy life, one filled with distractions, we often stop actually hearing. This can mean that we impose our own judgments onto whatever someone is saying before they finish their sentence, it could be that we’re daydreaming, it could be that we’re practicing what we’ll say next. All of these things prevent us from hearing each other. But half or more of the learning we’ll get to do in this space comes from what we take in, so for the next few years, I’ll endeavor to listen…and hear.
- Stop and pause. With so much whirling around us, and so much expectation on our time, it’s easy to get sucked into a feeling of overwhelm. In our leadership development workshops, some executives were surprised when we led them through mindfulness and breath exercises. But the practice of tuning-in to a moment is an important anchor in dealing with busyness and stress. So, I’m going to try to remember to stop and pause. To stop and breathe. To let my breath calm my nervous system, and then continue.
- Write. If we’re here in this MFA program to do anything, it’s write. I’ve seen the world out there, I know many of you have. But, as a reminder, it will be waiting for us on the otherside. Being a student is a gift. Getting to read and write and critique, a rarity. I’m going to try to remember that writing is my first priority; being a student is my first priority. Three years will go by quicker than I think any of us first-years can imagine. So, the time to write is, well, now.
Izzy Martens is a first-year MFA candidate in nonfiction. She is the co-author of the book Holding Space: A Guide to Mindful Facilitation. Her essays have been published in The Tiger Moth Review and PastTen, among others. She is the Managing Editor of Colorado Review.