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Listen until they hear themselves
An artist will often describe exactly what they want to do and then ask what to do, as if they can't hear themselves. Producer Rick Rubin compares this to talk therapy: through the talking, people start to understand what they believe and think, and sometimes they have epiphanies just because someone is listening.
When an artist wants to make an album, he asks them to play their favorites and listens. Then come the questions. What do you like about it? How did you get to that? What equipment did you use? Was it fun to make? Have you played it for friends, or in a club? What does it feel like when you play it for a friend?
Most people aren't used to being deeply heard. In a lot of conversations, the other person is thinking about what to say next. When someone is fully there, people tell him what they want to do, and his job is to help remove the roadblocks they put in their own way.
Why does saying something aloud clarify it?
In a 2007 study in Psychological Science, Matthew Lieberman and colleagues at UCLA found that putting feelings into words reduced activity in the amygdala, the brain's alarm center. Naming the feeling seemed to recruit the prefrontal cortex, which handles regulation. Speaking also forces vague thoughts into sentences, so contradictions show up. A listener who stays quiet gives that process room to run.
How did Carl Rogers change the way therapists listen?
The American psychologist Carl Rogers developed client-centered therapy from the 1940s onward. He had therapists reflect back what a person said, without interpreting or directing, and treat the person with what he called unconditional positive regard. His 1961 book On Becoming a Person made the method widely known. Active listening, as taught in management and counseling courses, grew out of his approach.
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