The Key to UX Research — Generative Listening
Last week, I released an episode that was a little unusual for Mixed Methods (a podcast about the how’s and why’s of UX research). Instead of talking to a user researcher, I had the opportunity to speak with Thomas McConkie, a mediation teacher as well as the creator of Mindfulness+ and faculty at Pacific Integral.
Thomas’s story feels like a real-life version of 7 Years in Tibet. He spent over a decade living in China working as a human rights activist and deepening his meditation practice. For the last 10 years, he’s also been studying developmental psychology, a field he believes will become an integral part of the way we interact and problem solve in the next decade.
For all of his study, Thomas has become many things, including a Listener. So much of what we explored in the course and episode centered around the generative power listening can have on those being heard. For me this has become foundational to my practice as a user experience researcher.
Here are some of my favorite excerpts from the conversation with Thomas:
The power of quality listening
Aryel Cianflone: I was surprised by how quickly you were able to create an environment of safety for a group of strangers (in the course) where they were opening up and sharing things that were just so personal. I would love to talk about how you did that.
Thomas McConkie: That’s a real compliment to hear that you felt safe in the environment and could feel the effects of what high-quality attention does for the experience of being with another person or people, so thanks for that. An image comes to mind actually that’s never occurred to me as you just say that. Imagine you’re crossing a kind of rickety footbridge, and a hundred feet below is this raging Amazonian river, so it’s precarious, but you have to cross it, let’s just say for the sake of argument, and the way you’re going to do it is to really set your foot down really gently on a plank of wood and see like, “Can I trust my weight to this?” If it feels like you can, then you trust all of your weight to it. You lift your back foot, set it in front of the other, but you have to test the ground beneath you to see if you’re held to see if it’s safe. In a sense, listening, what we call at Pacific Integral ‘Generative listening’. We call it ‘Generative listening’ because the very quality of your presence, and you’re listening to the other. It gives them the experience of being safe, that the ground beneath them as it were will support them.
My basic approach to bringing a room full of strangers together and creating a lot of trust and intimacy in a short amount of time is to really just drive home the teaching, that the quality of your presence is it’s not a passive act to listen to another person. It’s a creative act that draws a person out of themselves. It allows people to express things they didn’t know they could express, they didn’t know they had to express if you’re fully present. It’s the opposite of casting pearls before swine, that on the other end of the spectrum, there’s, “Here’s my pearl, and I’m going to show it to you because I can tell how reverent you are towards it”, and it actually feels really relieving to get to show this to somebody because in my heart of hearts, I long to share this part of me with somebody.
Aryel Cianflone: Yeah.
Thomas McConkie: That happens. What I’ve found is that adults are so game for that. If you give them an excuse to relate and get personal, we all really want it. We love intimacy. We love to be vulnerable, and we’re terrified of it.
In the next section, Thomas uses a powerful analogy to expand on how we can create the mental space needed for others to really open up and fully express themselves.
Creating space for greater insight
Thomas McConkie: Another image that comes to mind, just to help listeners really start to feel this in their bodies. I mean, what I’m describing here, it’s not a concept. It’s an embodied experience of being a human being and being in an intimate encounter. I think about an opera singer. Think about an opera singer who has trained their voice for decades and they can just belt it out and fill an entire auditorium.
Imagine that opera singer belting out their most beautiful note…in a telephone booth. Right? It’s like, “I don’t want to belt it out in a telephone booth. This isn’t the time or the place”, but then, symphony opera hall where their voice just spreads to infinity. It’s the most natural thing in the world to just fill the immensity of space with their voice.
Our awareness can be that space for another. Our awareness actually, again, metaphorically, it has a shape to it, and sometimes, when we meet somebody, the shape of our awareness is like a telephone booth. We have 10 seconds for them to say what they need to say, and then we’re not interested and we’re moving on. Then, there’s the quality of listening where it’s that opera hall quality, and it’s like this person just knows I can sing in this space.
Aryel Cianflone: Expansive. That’s such a beautiful analogy. That might be the most beautiful thing that’s ever been said on my podcast.
Thomas McConkie: Sing to me, Aryel.
A key part of this practice is mindfulness, or paying attention to how we pay attention. There are countless resources out there to learn more about this practice, but here’s Thomas’s 60 second version.
Mindfulness in 60 secs.
Thomas McConkie: I think about mindfulness as a practice, an art, and a science of paying attention to how we pay attention. We’re going to get into this when we talk about listening in a moment, but if you think about it, we’re always paying attention to something. Right now in this moment, you’re having a particular experience that has a particular composition and texture to it. You’re attending to your life, and in one moment, you’re listening to a podcast. In the next moment, you’re cooking some pasta for dinner. The scene is always changing, but we’re always attending.
Even when we’re spaced out, we’re attending to some daydream. Right? Mindfulness is just this exercise of paying attention to how we’re paying attention, and when we pay attention to how we pay attention, a choicefulness arises, because we realize that we can actually choose to pay attention in different ways to different things. I can pay a lot of attention to a grudge. I’ve been nursing for 20 years, or I can pay attention to the positive attributes that this person has that challenges me, and maybe that gives rise to forgiveness.
That’s an example. That’s mindfulness. That’s the 60-second crash course on mindfulness.
If you enjoyed this, check out the full episode here.
