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THE LISTENING
FILTERS
Here’s a potentially transformative concept: your listening is unique! It’s
as individual as your fingerprints, your irises, your voice print or your
face.
A common, persistent and very damaging assumption is that everyone
listens the same way. We do not. This is because we all listen through a
set of filters, and these filters are not the same for any 2 people because
they are shaped by our life experience and by our character. Taken
together, our filters create a default listening that can become a little like
a bunker with a small slit open to the world outside: only certain things
get in, and much simply bounces off. If we are unconscious of this
process, we can firmly believe that what we perceive through that small
opening is reality, whereas it is in fact a small, selected part of reality that
we interpret in our little bunker. Of course, what we think of as reality
actually happens between our ears: it is just our perception and thus
never complete. The trick is to become aware that we are viewing the map
and not the territory, in which case we can start to manage, and even
change, the limitations.
Let’s explore the listening filters.
Culture
You were born into a complex of cultures, each influencing the way you
listen. These may have included your nuclear and extended family; your
ethnicity; your neighbourhood; and your city, state and country. Any or
all of these environments may fashion your listening as you grow up.
Language
The language or languages that you learn to speak will further forge your
listening. Languages differ widely, not only in how they work but in the
words they have, or don’t have.
Tonal languages like those used in China, Vietnam and Thailand
distinguish identical words by using different pitches or inflexions, giving
them completely different meanings. Some of these languages create 7
different meanings for the same syllable, depending on whether it is said
high, low, with or without a croak and so on. Speakers of some African
tonal languages can communicate across long distances playing the tones
on drums, and there are hundreds of whistled languages where people in
places as diverse as France, West Africa, Madeira and Mexico can have
entire conversations with nothing but whistling, delivering the tones of
the language without the words.
Some languages treat time very differently to the way Indo-European
languages conceptualise it with the future in front of us and the past
behind, and tenses of verbs to indicate temporality. There are tenseless
languages, such as Hopi, and the Amazonian Amondawa language has no
words for time periods such as month or year. The Amondawa people do
not refer to their ages, but rather assume different names in different
stages of their lives or as they achieve different status within the
community.
Languages also emphasise the importance of things in the words they
use, or don’t use. The urban legend about Eskimos and words for snow
and ice is true. Central Siberian Yupik has 40 such terms, while the Inuit
dialect spoken in Canada’s Nunavik region has at least 53, including
matsaaruti
for wet snow that can be used to ice a sleigh’s runners, and
pukak
for the crystalline powder snow that looks like salt. In the Inupiaq
dialect of Alaska, there are about 70 quite poetic terms for ice, including
utuqaq
(ice that lasts year after year),
siguliaksraq
(the patchwork layer
of crystals that forms as the sea begins to freeze) and
auniq
(ice that is
filled with holes, like Swiss cheese).
Equally, languages can miss words, either because they are not relevant
to the experience of the people speaking that tongue, or simply because
nobody ever bothered to make one. In Czech,
vybafnout
is a single word
meaning to jump out and shout boo, a word lacking in English. The
reason is unclear: Czech children are probably no more playful than
English-speakers. In Brazilian,
cafune
is the act of tenderly running your
fingers through your loved one’s hair. Perhaps Brazilians are more
romantic than most!
One of my favourite books is
The Meaning of Liff
by Douglas Adams and
John Lloyd, where the brilliantly witty authors suggest hundreds of
things that really ought to have words but don’t (in English, anyway) and
give them words taken from obscure place names. So, a berriwillock is an
unknown workmate who writes ‘All the best’ on your leaving card; a
grimbister is a body of cars on a motorway all moving at exactly the speed
limit because one of them is a police car; and to dinder is to nod
thoughtfully while someone gives you a long and complex set of
directions which you know you’re never going to remember.
Our language shapes our perception, something that may be behind
many differences and conflicts.
Values
As you grew, you accreted values from parents, friends, teachers, role
models and authority figures. You selected some and discarded others,
probably largely in your teenage years where most people try on a range
of identities before settling on the one they choose to make their own.
As we saw in our discussion of the People-Pleasing leech, most people
never make their values explicit and many don’t know what they are at
all. The values exercise in that section can be very valuable to identify and
be conscious of the values that drive you and underpin your behaviour,
and your listening.
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