What do you talk about at a two-day conference where the sole topic is listening? For the International Listening Association, a society of dedicated listeners that gathers every year for a big convention, it's a perennial conundrum.
The joke among presenters, of course, is that you can't find a better audience—they're all ears.
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Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi shown in 2010. He received the International Listening Association's highest honor.
Listening is a serious topic for the association's 300 members. They include both social scientists who study the mechanics of listening and professionals who want to sharpen their listening skills so they can better communicate with clients.
But there's an unspoken truth behind all the attentiveness: When your passion is listening, it's hard to find folks who share your interest. So even when allegedly silent types gather from cities around the globe, the rooms ultimately fill with chatter—about listening strategies and the latest listening research.
"We have good listeners, but we have a lot of good talkers too," says executive director Nanette Johnson-Curiskis.
Among them is consultant Manny Steil, who teaches executives how to better absorb what they hear. As for himself? He's apt to answer a simple question with a 20-minute monologue. Listening, he says, is "a tough business to be in when you're a talker."
Mr. Steil, CEO of the International Listening Leadership Institute in St. Paul, Minn., founded the ILA in 1979. Within a year, he organized the association's first conference. But much to his chagrin, Mr. Steil says the public's interest in listening doesn't seem to be growing. As the Twitterati replaces the literati, "I think there's more of an interest in being listened to than ever before," he says.
While most folks dismiss listening as a simple matter, the experts know better. Almost every ILA wonk offers his own propriety listening model, ranging from Mr. Steil's seven-stage "Steil SIER" listening pyramid to Winnipeg, Manitoba, consultant Dwight Harfield's "Harfield Cognitive Listening Model," a colorful traffic map that breaks the listening process into components such as "hearing" and "responding."
Perhaps the most visually impressive model belongs to past ILA President Alan Ehrlich, creator of "The Process of Listening," a flow chart that looks like a schema for a nuclear submarine. "I have no idea how accurate it is," he says. "All I know is that no one else came up with it."
Mr. Ehrlich, who founded the Center for Listening Disorders Research in Plainsboro, New Jersey, envisions a world populated by listening therapists and listening pathologists who can diagnose and remedy listening difficulties such as hearing loss, cognitive problems or chronic distraction. "Right now, if you have trouble listening, you have no place to go," he says.
Unless, of course, you're with the ILA. This summer, four members completed the association's yearlong course of online lectures and exercises needed to earn the professional designation of "Certified Listening Professional." And throughout this year's conference in Montreal, members learned the fine art of compassionate listening and "listening through strategic questioning," while honing their "pre-listening skills."
One highlight: a workshop on Listening to the Self. Participants practiced grilling themselves aloud while facing a wall to better hear their own answers."Your inner voice is your personal GPS," said presenter Michael Murphy. "You're probably pretty good company—give yourself a chance."
The conference happened to coincide with prom night in Montreal. After midnight, the staid hotel came alive with the sounds of partying teens blasting music and crashing about in the halls. But few of the conference attendees called the front desk to complain. They lay quietly in their beds, listening to the shrieking and thumping.
Indeed, members say they truly love to listen to others orate. "There are times when it's almost like a dream state. Time passes and you have no notice of it," says Michael Purdy, a retired professor and 1994 inductee into the association's Listening Hall of Fame. "We could be here for an hour and I wouldn't know!"
A bleary-eyed but attentive crowd attended the next day's panel discussion on the theme, "What is listening?" Florida Gulf Coast University professor Maria Loffredo Roca defined listening as the opening of the self to the possibility of being moved and changed by the other. And yet: "True listening is virtually impossible," she acknowledged, due to the level of humility and reverence required.
A second presenter read a poem. Graham Bodie, an academic with a taste for Latin phrases and German phenomenology concluded that "Listening is the mediation between firstness and secondness…but there's always thirdness leaking into it."
Mr. Bodie works at Louisiana State University's listening lab, a four-room complex featuring a mock living room where researchers videotape and analyze conversations. Among the findings cited by Mr. Bodie: the more people talk, the higher they rate their own listening skills.
The conference finale: a banquet dinner where the association presented its annual "Listener of the Year Award"—an honor reserved for people whose closed mouths and open ears help set a standard for others in academic or business practices. In past years, it chose famous folks such as Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz (2012) and Michelle Obama (2011). This year, the association tried a new tactic, awarding its highest honor to CBC radio talk show host Jian Ghomeshi. He's big in Canada.
"I'm aware a lot of people in the room don't know who I am," said the modest honoree. Before receiving the prize, he added, he didn't really know much about the ILA, "But I'm a big fan of listening!" The members gave him a standing ovation.
At night's end, in a solemn ceremony, Mr. Ehrlich passed the association's gavel to newly elected President Debra Worthington. True to form, the communications professor had no acceptance speech. She simply smiled and announced, "I think the next order of business is to adjourn." The assembled quickly dispersed, headed home for another year of listening.
