For my course managing the client-consultant relationship I’m reading “Helping” (Edgar Schein), which is (so far) a great book about relationships, about reciprocation, about life.

Schein begins describing the essence of relationships as an exchange of value and as a role playing. He uses the economic and the theater analogies to illustrate how we relate each other. He mentions that in a relationship the two actors must decide who is “actor” (talking) and who is “audience” (listening) and the situation will define the “value” involved in the interaction.

I would like to reflect on the listening/talking relationship and to highlight the listening as an ACT. Whether in a theater or in a relationship, the listener (audience) is also an actor in terms of he/she is actively listening. What do I mean? When we are listening to someone we are not “receiving a message” but we are “building a story” from our history, from our personal worldview, from our own language. This story that we build is not always the same as the one the other person told us, each one tells and listen/build his own story, and we all know that most of the times we listen different things or we fail to listen other things (those that don’t “fit” in our life).

As an international student (I’m from Chile) is, in a certain way, easier for me to recognize this difference because of the culture gap. One example is that what you listen when you hear the word “terrorism” is completely different than what I listen (beyond the difference of language of course), because our different histories. So, we are putting a lot more from ourselves than we think when we are listening to someone. It is good to be aware of that, because it helps us in helping relationships (whatever those are). Think about a classic couple discussion: “yes, I told you”, “no, you didn’t tell me anything about that”, “yes, I told you, but you never listen to me!” etc, etc.

 In an organizational client-consultant relationship we don’t do that but we think like that (why he didn’t told me?!). It would be useful to ask ourselves how much I am “painting” this story.

(apologizes for grammar errors, my English isn’t so good yet)