Listening

6. Civic Knowledge and Skills

Heidi used to teach an undergraduate conflict skills class. At the end of the semester, she always told her students "if you only remember two words from this class years later, those two words should be "respect" and "listen."

Listening is an incredibly powerful conflict preventer and conflict resolver. Several mediators with the U.S. Department of Justice's Community Relations Service, the arm of the Justice Department tasked with calming down and, if possible, resolving large scale racial conflicts told us that listening was a key to success. Dick Salem (himself a CRS mediator and regional director) wrote in his BI essay on empathic listening:

Even when the conflict is not resolved during mediation, the listening process can have a profound impact on the parties. Jonathon Chace, associate director of the U.S. Community Relations Service, recalls a highly charged community race-related conflict he responded to more than 30 years ago when he was a mediator in the agency's Mid-Atlantic office. It involved the construction of a highway that would physically divide a community centered around a public housing project. After weeks of protest activity, the parties agreed to mediation. In the end, the public officials prevailed and the aggrieved community got little relief. When the final session ended, the leader of the community organization bolted across the floor, clasped the mediator's hand and thanked him for being "different from the others."

"How was I different?" Chace asked. "You listened," was the reply. "You were the only one who cared about what we were saying."[1]

That line was repeated by many of the CRS mediators we interviewed for our Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project.

However, "normal listening" does not have that impact. Instead, one needs to do what is commonly called "active listening" or "reflective listening." In his BI article, Dick called it "empathic listening," because it builds empathy with the speaker. (We had originally asked Dick to write two essays for BI — one on listening and the other on empathy — and his response was that "they were the same thing!) We will not describe how active listening is different from "normal listening" here — that will be covered in detail in the links below. Suffice it to say here that it is deep, attentive listening, where one really makes a strong effort to understand both the substance and the emotion behind the words being spoken. By doing so, Dick argued, "empathic listening has empowering qualities. Providing an opportunity for people to talk through their problem may clarify their thinking as well as provide a necessary emotional release." So it facilitates problem solving and mends relationships, even in intractable conflicts.