Marriage Voice

Marriage and relationship complaints about partners not listening are offered by those who themselves often don't listen.

A husband and father I know complains of his teenage children: "they just don't listen! How do you get your children to listen?"

A second kind of listening is more often found in business but it's there everyday in marriage as well. We call it 'listening with the intention of influencing.' This kind of listening attends to the values and beliefs, the life story, the current challenges of the one speaking. These then are carefully folded into your response so that you increase your effectiveness in leading the conversation where you want it to go.
In order to influence another person you first have to know 'where they live.' Not their street address of course, I'm talking about their inner world.

The brilliant web designer and graphic artist, Dan Grant (iDigDesign.com) read my last piece (Marriage is about Love, but..) on competent listening and shot me an email. "Stephen, I like your breaking down listening to three skill sets, but you should give us more. How about an article on each one?"

"All you need is love... da, da da-da, da-da, da" so goes the lovely John Lennon mantra, and he's right. And also missing something. I have known many people who actually love other people but their fear or their insecurity or their past wounds and losses - get in their way. The person loved often doesn't experience this love as loving.

In our last blog we pointed out that isolating yourselves from each other, from your family or from your community – is dangerous. Many demons live in the silos we create and they're quite happy to flood our minds with images that destroy relationships.