About Listening

If you ask Dr. Google or AI, you’ll get a wide variety of explanations for how to define “listening”. On this page, however, I’d like to share my own definition of “listening” with you.

An anagram is a word in which rearranging all the letters (without omitting any letters or adding any new ones) creates a new, meaningful word. And the same goes for the word “Listen” and the German word “Zuhoeren”. The word “Listen” becomes “Silent”, and the word “Zuhoeren” becomes “Ruhezone”. And that’s what I mean by “genuine listening”.

To me, listening means providing the other person with a space in which the listener is quiet and calm. Not just in the sense of “not speaking”, but also in the sense that the listener’s mind is quiet and calm. A state where there are only a few (ideally, none at all) of one’s own thoughts, and one is completely present with and immersed in the other person’s thoughts. That, to me, is genuine listening.

Truly listening is indeed one of the most challenging tasks one can face in life. Why? Because we humans simply live in our own (mental) world. Thoughts are constantly swirling inside us, which means that when communicating with others, we always have to internally reconcile the information they provide with our own. That’s why everything that comes in from the outside is constantly interpreted through our own lens. And that rarely has anything to do with what the other person really wants to say. Here’s a concrete example: the other person says, “My vacation in Greece was wonderful”. If you’ve been to Greece yourself, images immediately pop into your head (that is, thoughts, because thoughts are always words and images) based on your own ideas and your own experiences in Greece. And that has nothing – absolutely nothing – to do with the other person’s actual experiences and impressions. Even in simple conversations about vacations, people are actually talking completely past one another.

In this example, genuine listening would mean setting aside your own thoughts about Greece and putting yourself in the other person’s shoes. It’s clear that this won’t always work 100%, but it’s the only way it works.

From this perspective, I coined the term “Speaking Space”. The term “Speaking Space” is used to describe my listening service.

For further explanation: on the one hand, it means that you can “finish what you’re saying” – that is, you aren’t interrupted while speaking. You can bring a train of thought to a logical conclusion through speech. On the other hand, however, it also means “voicing” something – that is, bringing what you carry within you mentally or emotionally out into the “space” around you. I view the term “Speaking Space” from both of these perspectives and define it accordingly.

In summary: genuine listening means letting the other person finish speaking until they have organized their thoughts. And for the listener, it means giving the other person the space to do so, whenever possible.