When humans are sad or unhappy,
silent companionship is the order of the day.
. . . That usually cheers them up.
—Bob (the West Highland Terrier),
A Dog’s Guide to Humans by Karen Davison
Dogs have amazing ears, much better than ours. Not only can their ears be moved independently to “catch” sound and pinpoint its exact source(s), but they can also detect much higher frequencies than ours and, according to Dog Breed Info Center, hear sounds from about four times farther away than human ears.1
1 http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/articles/dogsenses.htm
That explains why dogs are such great listeners, right? Well, no, not entirely. Sure, great hearing is part of the equation, but the reason dogs are such great listeners—especially to humans—is that they don’t just listen with their ears, they listen with their whole being. Dogs know instinctively, if not intellectually, that listening goes far beyond merely snagging sound waves from the air.
To truly listen—like a dog—means to give someone your undiluted, committed, and fully energized attention. That kind of attention requires much more than an opening of the ears; it requires a whole body/whole being commitment. That’s what dogs give to us. And this experience we humans have—of feeling paid attention to by dogs—is not just wishful thinking on the part of dog lovers. As it turns out, there’s a growing body of scientific work suggesting that dogs, of all the creatures in the animal kingdom (including our closest cousins, the great apes), are tuned in to us as no other being on Earth is. This is probably a function of their intelligence, combined with their almost total dependence on us for food, shelter, and ball-throwing. But whatever the explanation, dogs seem to have made a collective decision to zero in on humankind with such laser-like focus that they almost seem to be reading our minds. This deep connection dogs have with us seems to go back thousands of years in our collective history.
In her wonderful book Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, Alexandra Horowitz goes into fascinating detail about the ways dogs pay attention to us. Dogs study the daily activities we engage in. They study the way we walk and move. They study our facial expressions (a lot, and with an ultra-fine degree of discernment). They study our habits and the breaking of our habits. They study our schedules. They study our posture, body language, and energy levels. They sniff out changes in our body chemistry. They study our moods and intentions. They even study what we study—dogs, it seems, are experts at knowing where our attention is focused and then responding to that. All it takes is the subtlest change in our attention, or intention, and dogs know where our interest has shifted. For example, just try entertaining the thought Think I’ll take the dog for a walk and hiding those intentions from your dog. (Good luck with that, by the way.)
Attention = Energy
By contrast, we humans aren’t very good at paying attention to one another. We might notice if someone’s arm falls off (provided we’re not getting a text message at the time), but we don’t pay much attention to the finer details. Honed, focused attention is really what listening like a dog is all about. When a dog pays attention to a human, it pulls out all the stops. It uses its eyes, its nose, it ears, its tactile senses—its entire energy system.
What are some of the ways we can tell if a dog is listening to us?
There’s none of that “Are you listening to me?” stuff that humans are always asking each other; there’s no mistaking a dog’s attention. Of course, we humans don’t have tails, dynamic noses, or expressively moving ears, but we do have our own dandy set of human faculties that can be quite effective in the attention-paying game. We just need to use them. The point is, attention is an active form of energy, not a passive one. It’s something we literally beam out. “Whole being” listening is a state in which all of your energy, not just your hearing sense, is directed toward the other person. It’s about tapping into your inner dog. Most of us experience this heightened kind of listening only once in a while. But we can make it a replicable experience by using the following three keys.
1. Make the commitment to listen.
2. Listen with your eyes, heart, and ears.
3. Let your attention show in your whole body.
Making the Commitment to Listen
The main reason most of us fail as listeners is that we approach listening in a lazy, undisciplined, and decidedly non-doggy way. We fail to make the commitment to listen. You must make a conscious and deliberate decision to disengage from whatever mode you’re currently in—speaking mode, daydreaming mode, writing mode, game mode, zoning out to So You Think You Can Dance mode—and devote yourself, whether for ten seconds or two hours, to pure, focused listening.
You must make this commitment prior to entering any situation where listening is going to be your role. But you should also make it on an as-needed basis many times over the course of a day. As soon as you see that someone needs your listening attention and you decide to give it, you must make the commitment to listen and actively shift gears into listening mode. If you don’t make the commitment, your attention remains split and diffused.
The commitment to listen really is as simple as commanding yourself: “STOP current mental activity; shift into listening gear.” It can help to actually envision a stop sign in your mind or to imagine the sound of a buzzer (psychologists call this process “thought-stopping”). On the other hand, it isn’t always so simple in practice. Our minds, by nature, are complicated and full of noise, thus we tend to zone out. We almost need a traffic cop in our heads directing things since it’s so congested in there. Making the commitment to listen is an incredibly respectful thing to do, however. It communicates: you are more important to me than my need to . . . finish this e-mail right now; make this brilliant Scrabble play on my iPad; or get this onion chopped. It also leads to efficiency and goodwill, because (1) you hear the person’s message without asking to have it repeated five times; (2) the other person feels heard and validated; and (3) you can then go back to what you were doing before with 100 percent of your attention. Everyone wins!
Dogs do this naturally. They don’t give you half-baked attention while trying to chew a bone—“Yeah, yeah, I’m listening; go on.” They may be 100 percent wrapped up in that bone, but when they notice you talking to them, and they make the commitment to listen, their head pops up and they leave the bone behind. They switch 100 percent of their attention to you. Then, when you’re finished addressing them, they go back to giving 100 percent of their attention to the bone.
If you want someone to listen to you—really listen—first ask them if it’s a good time for them to listen. It’s a mistake to assume that whenever we want to talk, the other person is ready to listen like a dog. The truth is that they have distractions, moods, and time constraints that may make it challenging for them to fully take us in at that moment. By gaining their commitment to listen, not only are we gaining their respect for asking, but we’re more likely to get a doglike listener (when they’re ready).
The most important part of the commitment to listen is to turn on your three main listening receptors: your eyes, your heart, and your ears.
The Eyes Have It
Ask people what the most important organ for listening is and ten out of ten of them will say the ears. And while it’s true that we collect much of our verbal information through the ears, it’s also true that our ears are virtually useless in making connections with fellow human beings.
Human ears just sit there, looking like some weird species of mollusk we wouldn’t eat if we found it in a bowl of paella. They funnel sound waves, but they communicate absolutely no emotion; they have almost no expressive power whatsoever; they are completely passive organs.
Here’s where dogs have us beat. Dogs’ ears are expressive. They not only move about, individually, to track sound, but they also perk up when the dog is excited, go askew when the dog is confused, droop when the dog is sad (or busted from getting into the trash again), and go flat when the dog is angry. A dog has at least eighteen separate muscles that control its ear movements.1
1 http://thebark.com/content/amazing-facts-about-dogs-ears
So how can we humans compensate for our decidedly non-expressive ears? By using our eyes.
Your eyes are the most overlooked and underrated listening apparatus you possess. The eyes are extremely powerful instruments of connectivity for humans, but they are rarely treated with the level of importance they deserve. Sure, you may hear advice like, “Don’t forget to make good eye contact . . . oh, and wear a red power tie, too” in communications workshops, but that’s about as far as it goes. If you want to become a better connecter, though, you must learn to use your eyes as the power tools they are. And once again, dogs have a lot to teach us.
Even if dogs could not use their ears so expressively, they would still be models of intense listening because of the power of their gaze. The canine gaze is legendary in its purity and focus. Many people have argued about whether a dog has a “soul” or is capable of emotions similar to ours. For dog lovers, the question is cleared up easily: just look into a dog’s eyes.
The living presence that is seen through one’s eyes—human or canine—cannot be faked. In the eyes you see the very center of awareness, the operator of the biological hardware, the captain of the ship. In the eyes you see emotional truth.
Want to hook someone emotionally? Show them a picture of a child or an animal making eye contact with the camera. Want to make an instant connection with a stranger? Look him or her in the eye. Want to engage someone’s help and cooperation? Make eye contact.
Conversely, want to avoid engagement? Avoid being chosen as a volunteer? Avoid helping another person? Look away. (This doesn’t always work. Teachers know the technique so well they often deliberately pick the kid who looks away. And, of course, when you come home and your dog won’t look you in the eye, you know there’s a mess somewhere, right?)
A focused gaze communicates sincerity, conviction, and basic human connection. That’s why looking away is often seen as a sign of deceit. When Richard M. Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election, many attributed it to his habit of shifting his eyes during the nation’s first-ever televised debate. Similarly, the infamous “thousand-yard stare” of traumatized war veterans and victims signals disconnection
—from others, with that unfocused and blank stare.
But the eyes are more than just windows; they may, in fact, be closer to lasers, capable of beaming out energy and information. Many cultures throughout history have believed this. Belief in the evil eye, for example—the ability of a focused stare to cause harm to another person—has been widespread throughout the world. We know it as a mother to the teenager who took the car without permission, a wife to a husband who was caught with a hand in the cookie jar, so to speak, one boxer to the other in the ring, Predator versus Alien, you get the gist of it. Also common is the belief that humans can control, enlighten, hypnotize, and heal other people simply by the power of their gaze. Interestingly, some belief systems, such as Zoroastrianism, have attributed this type of power to dogs as well!2
2 http://tenets.zoroastrianism.com/dog33.html
Western science, of course, rejected this “primitive” idea that the eyes are capable of emitting energy (extramission theory) long ago when it adopted the model of the eye as basically a biological Nikon. Some scientists today, however, are taking another look and, once again, discovering truth in ancient wisdom.
Scientist Rupert Sheldrake, for example, became fascinated by the common feeling that one is being watched. Why do we so often seem to know when someone is staring at us? Is the phenomenon real or just our imagination? (Any guy who has tried to steal a long look at a beautiful woman knows it’s real. He gets caught every time.) In his book The Sense of Being Stared At and Other Unexplained Powers of Human Minds, Sheldrake describes interviews with numerous people who watch others for a living: police officers, detectives, security guards, and surveillance personnel. Most of them, through experience, are convinced that people can, in fact, tell when they’re being watched. He also cites several experiments that strongly indicate that humans can indeed detect the stare of an unseen stranger. Private investigators, writes Sheldrake, know this phenomenon so well they actually learn methods for avoiding triggering their subjects’ “stare detectors.”
Dr. Colin A. Ross has taken it a step further and developed a device that can measure energy coming from an open eye. He has detected measurable “brain wave” emissions coming from the human eye, and has also found that the intensity of this emitted energy changes with the brain’s activity (suggesting that the looker’s mental intentions can have a significant effect on the beamed waves). Ross has patented a technology by which he hopes one day can create things like switches that can be turned on and off simply by looking at them. Imagine the “remote control wars” that will cause in family rooms everywhere!
Here are a few of the things that can be communicated to someone by making or maintaining eye contact:
Conversely, breaking eye contact or averting the eyes serves a great many purposes as well:
Because eye contact has so much power and so many different meanings, both positive and negative, it is a difficult skill for many people to master. If you don’t make enough eye contact, people may think you are shy, a dweeb, insincere, bored, insecure, or inaccessible. If you make too much eye contact, people may think you are creepy, intense, socially awkward, or domineering. No one wants to be thought of as a starer. It’s all about balance.
As a model for good eye contact, it’s hard to do better than dogs. They are naturally amazing at it. They gaze deeply, sincerely, and unselfconsciously, but they also know enough not to gaze too long—that at a certain point a gaze can become a threat or a challenge. Have you ever had a staring contest with a dog? Who won? If the answer is you, I will question whether or not you were cheating. Dogs will typically win, paws down, unless and until the UPS truck goes by or an SIA (Sudden Itch Attack) comes on.
Generally speaking, holding eye contact for four or five seconds at a time is good. It needn’t be done more than half the total time you are talking to someone. In fact, eye contact for more than two-thirds of the time begins to indicate that you’re hot for the person, which may not be your desired effect—especially if you’re in the middle of an IRS audit.
The important thing is not about specific “rules,” but rather to become aware of how you use your eyes and to know how powerful they are. Your eyes are the number-one way by which you establish connection with others and by which they gauge and assess you. The eyes are indeed the windows to your soul, so break out the Windex and turn up the inner lights.
Your Heart Has Ears
The second key organ of listening is the heart. Many of us, when listening, make the mistake of using only our heads. We focus all of our attention on trying to download the information that’s being conveyed. But if you want to make a connection—the way a dog would—you need to engage with the person as well. That means using the heart.
As an organ of connection, the heart is every bit as important as the eyes. “Listen with your heart” might sound annoyingly touchy-feely, but it is critical advice in this era of Emotional Intelligence. You need to attune yourself emotionally to the people you’re listening to—especially if you want to build any kind of lasting relationship, business or personal. Emotional attunement happens through the heart.
This has long been known by poets and songwriters, but science has always remained skeptical—until recently. A whole spate of new research is confirming that the heart is much more than a sophisticated pump. The heart, we are beginning to learn, actually feeds more electrical signals to the brain than the brain does to the heart, giving it a more primary role than we ever imagined. And these heart signals change under different emotional conditions, ordering the brain to function differently. When feeling stress, for example, the heart beats in a ragged pattern that cues the brain to shut down some of its higher thinking functions and go into survival mode. When feeling peaceful, loving, and positive emotions, the heart beats in a smoother and more orderly way (called coherence). This, in turn, calms the brain’s emotional centers and allows our thought processes to be more relaxed, focused, clear, and efficient. The brain and the heart are in constant communication, and much of it is on an emotional level.3
3 www.heartmath.org/programs/emwave-self-regulation-technology-theoretical-basis/
What’s perhaps most interesting, from a communications standpoint, is that scientists now know that the heart emits a powerful electromagnetic field. The heart’s field is by far the most powerful magnetic field in the human body, about 5,000 times more powerful than the field emitted by the brain.4 And this field is not restricted to the body; it radiates outward as far as ten feet away, where it can affect the hearts and brains of others. The really fascinating aspect of this, according to Rollin McCraty, PhD, Executive VP and Director of Research for the Institute of HeartMath, is that specific emotions are encoded within the electromagnetic field that the heart generates.5 That means that we literally beam our emotional state out into the world. Ever wonder why some people, by their very presence, seem to lift us up and inspire us, while others seem to drain our energy like a psychic sump pump? For the first time in history, we have solid scientific evidence that our inner emotional state can permeate those around us.
4 http://www.wakingtimes.com/2012/09/12/the-heart-has-its-own-brain-and-consciousness/
5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxOd4YAk00Y
What this means is that the heart absolutely cannot be left out of the listening equation. It must be factored in, and not only by therapists, poets, and energy healers, but also by salespeople and managers, friends and lovers.
To me, this comes down to a simple practice. To the extent you are capable, hold a caring feeling in your heart each time you enter into a listening encounter. Just hold that state and feel it in your chest. But also remember that your heart is a “tuner”—a receiver—as well as a sender. So keep a sense of openness and receptivity in your heart. This will allow you to tune in to some of the feelings of the other person as well. When that person says, or feels, something that touches you emotionally, allow yourself to feel it in your heart. Allow it to come through your eyes as well. Just quietly let the emotion register within you. The connection you form by resonating with the other person in this way will be a lasting and genuine one, even if there are superficial things you disagree about.
This might sound like New Age fluff to you, but I guarantee you that if you make a serious effort to begin listening with both your eyes and heart—again, there’s no better model than a hound—you will notice a profound change in the way others respond to you. You will notice more trust, more affection, more sharing, more gratitude—and more willingness to involve you in high-level decision making. I’ve never heard a dog accused of being heartless. They’re all heart, all of the time, and, in turn, we have love and affection in our hearts for them.
Listen with Your Ears
Of course, you need to listen with your ears as well. The problem for many of us is that we are unable to listen effectively with our ears because we are torn between listening to the flesh-and-blood person speaking over there and to the little person speaking to us inside our head. When you listen, you are often listening to both voices—the voice of the person speaking and the nonstop voice track that’s yammering inside your own noggin.
The inner voice track is full of all sorts of worries and concerns: trying to think of a clever line to say, fretting about time and schedule issues, worrying about whether the conversation is tipping in your favor, trying to second-guess what the other person is going to say next, and even wondering what you’re going to have for dinner. The result: the real person speaking to you fades into background noise, or, at best, gets a costarring role. How many times have you been “listening” to someone and you suddenly realize you have no clue what they just said to you? The reason? Your inner voice track began giving a command performance.
A huge part of the commitment to listen is making a conscious decision to turn down (or off, if possible) the inner voice track and turn up your actual ears. The key to a successful communicative experience is when there is only one voice speaking at a time. This includes inner and outer voices. It’s amazing how much you can take in if you give total attention to what’s coming in through your ears.
Let Your Attention Show in Your Whole Body
The final challenge in listening with your whole being is to allow your whole body to participate in the listening process, by physically acknowledging what you hear. Notice I said, “allow,” not “force.”
As I mentioned earlier, there’s never a doubt as to whether a dog is paying attention to you. Their entire body is involved—ears, eyes, head, nose, tail, limbs. You know you have their attention. It’s indisputable. With human listeners, though, you’re rarely so sure. Are they really listening or not? Most humans are somewhat inhibited in their body language and don’t realize the importance of letting others see their attention and interest.
The fact is, no matter how fascinated you are with what’s being said to you, it does little good if the person talking can’t tell. So, part of great listening is learning to: (1) show attention through body alertness; and (2) respond in physical ways to what the speaker is saying (and feeling).
This does not mean trotting out a bunch of hammy behaviors like a bad actor. It means being physically responsive to the speaker in a way that feels comfortable and authentic to you. Perhaps you feel natural using enthusiastic facial expressions. Perhaps your comfort zone tends toward the more reserved. Perhaps you naturally show interest by nodding, or perhaps you tilt your head the way a listening dog does. Perhaps you’re an easy laugher, perhaps not. Whatever feels true and authentic to you will come across as authentic to others. On the other hand, putting on expressions that aren’t authentically yours will feel phony, both to yourself and others. The point is: allow physical expression to happen, and to happen in your own natural way.
Of course, you don’t necessarily want to project every feeling you feel. Suspicion, boredom, or contempt for your boss may not be in your best interest to reveal. But when an emotion that is both honest and productive strikes you, allow it to play out physically in your body as well as in your heart and your eyes. Be generous enough to get your body into the act.
I say “generous” because physical feedback really is a gift to the person who’s speaking. Dogs don’t disguise or hide their enthusiasm and attention. You see it in every muscle in their body. Contrary to the famous painting, dogs would make lousy poker players. Humans don’t realize the importance of bodily expression.
Learning to get your body into the act might take a little practice. It is more a matter of releasing inhibitions than teaching yourself a new skill. It is learning to allow your body to reflect what you’re authentically feeling inside.
You might occasionally need to fake it a little. That’s right: you might occasionally need to use the body language without feeling the feeling. I realize this goes against everything I’ve been saying about authenticity, but here’s the interesting thing: if you use body language that is authentically yours, it often triggers the very emotional state you’re emulating, and soon you’re not faking it any longer; you’re feeling it. (If you don’t believe me, try smiling your signature smile. Admit it, you suddenly feel happier, don’t you?)
Your ears, your eyes, and your heart, together, make up an incredibly powerful listener. The greatest challenge, though, is remembering to use them consciously and mindfully. This is where the commitment to listen comes in. Each time you begin to listen, even for just a minute, remind yourself to turn on your eyes, tune in your heart, open your ears, and bring your body into play. This is “whole being” listening—this is listening like a dog.
Something to
Chew On . . .
Mancs
If you visit the Hungarian town of Miskolc, you will find a statue of a German shepherd near the Szinva stream and public square. The statue was cast by sculptor Borbála Szanyi and erected in December 2004. The beautiful and touching memorial honors a famous rescue dog named Mancs (“paw”), who was a member of the Spider Special Rescue Team based in Miskolc.
Mancs and the rescue team traveled around the world to search for survivors after earthquakes. Mancs, who was known for his keen sense of hearing and smell, could locate people trapped deep beneath the earthquake rubble. As if this feat wasn’t astonishing enough, he could also differentiate whether the person was dead or alive, then indicate
his discovery with a very clear signal to the other members of the
rescue crew. If he sensed a deceased person, he laid down; when he sensed someone alive beneath the rubble, he stood up, wagged his tail, and barked.
Mancs and his owner, László Lehóczki, took part in several earthquake rescue missions, including the 2001 earthquakes in El Salvador and India. Mancs became famous worldwide when he helped rescue a three-year-old girl who spent eighty-two hours under the ruins after the Izmit (Turkey) earthquake of 1999. Sadly, Mancs passed away from pneumonia on October 22, 2006. In honor of the dog and his heroic rescue efforts, a feature film entitled Mancs (released internationally as Paw) was released in late 2014, making a posthumous film star of the dog who used his keen hearing and sense of smell to save lives.