Spoiler alert: I dont believe many therapists are master listeners (if any).

It might sound harsh, but DP has taught me that there is no such thing as natural talent or mastery. All masters had to earn it, through very hard work and strong support systems, none of them were born with it. Mastery is only a product of practicing deliberately.

I believe as therapists we are all great listeners (hopefully), it’s hard to be a therapist without being able to listen. Chances are we grew up with experiences in life where being a great listener was a necessity – perhaps even to survive. However I don’t think we’ve grasped how to improve our listening ability to go beyond great, to become master listeners.

A key reason is simply that truly listening without distraction while managing your own automatic reactions, is super hard, because of how our brain is wired for threat detection. When we are listening we are in threat detection mode, which means our fight vs flight system is on. If this is true, it means one has to contend with fight vs flight in order to listen deeply.

I also think it’s really easy to take our listening ability for granted. To assume that because it’s a foundational skill surely we have it down pat by now. With that assumed confidence, we can get pulled into the allure of the new and shiny – to focus on learning new skills and therapies. DP teaches that if you don’t consistently and directly work at your weak spots for a foundational skill, then it won’t improve at all, in fact your ability to listen may slowly decline without giving it some regular love. In short, I don’t think we give our listening ability enough sustained attention to take them to a level of mastery.

Next, I know for me it’s important to be relatively calm in order to deeply listen, but how I’m expected to work can make that really hard. 5-6 clients, with ten minutes break in-between, where I’m mostly writing casenotes, is not a recipe for serenity now.

I know because of that last point, I tend to listen best to my first client, they get me at Chris Hemsworth. Whereas my last client gets me at Liam Hemsworth. Both are great actors, but one is superior to the other.

Last but not least, we have to do more than just listen in therapy sessions, we are also expected to analyse or problem solve what’s going on for a client – that’s part of what they pay for. The problem is though, as soon as we move our cognitive resources to analyse or problem solve, we stop listening, our brain can’t multitask effectively. It’s this very issue as to why I’m working on a series of systems to help a client tell me which of those three modes I need to prioritise using in a session, but more on that another time.

It also comes down to how we were trained as well. I believe that what I was taught during university were mostly empathic listening skills, to show a client that I’m listening, such as reflections. These were not necessarily skills to increase my listening ability, as in how to actually use my eyes and ears more effectively when with a client.

I’ve been so fixated on this lately, because as I’m sure we’d all agree – listening is crucial to our job. The better you listen, the more heard, seen, safe and trusting a client will feel. In turn your interventions are then far more likely to allign with what a client needs.

So why don’t we spend much more time trying to improve our listening ability?

I’ve spoken to a few athletes, professional, amateur and in-between; asking them whether they see working on their mental game as important for their performance. Lots of them say that their mental game is crucial but they spend way less time working on it than their physical game. I think we might be treating our listening ability the same way.

Carl Rogers may have been one of the only one’s who understood the importance of working very consistently on listening ability (he apparently hated empathic listening skills).

One of his qoutes about listening well was “assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.”

But after he died no one really picked up the torch and our field instead pursued easier directions. Directions that don’t focus heavily on listening.

If you want to read another great article about listening that references Carl Rogers, then check out this article: https://growcounseling.com/listening-is-difficult/

In my recent efforts to build a system on whether to listen, analyse or problem solve with clients; I realised that improving my ability to listen will likely give better leverage first. In that my analysis and problem solving abilities are hindered when I’m not listening.

So now watch me turn to becoming a better listener.

I will therefore leave you with these questions: What percentage of a therapy session are you listening vs analysing vs problem solving? Are there times in a session when you zone out or stop listening? If so – how do you improve that?

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