Dear Jake,

(I was going to start with, "So my teacher and I were talking yesterday," but felt like that was awkward since you are pretty much my only reader. So anyways. That's that.)

I was really challenged by our conversation yesterday about story-catching. I feel like "active listener" and "deep listener" are really overused terms that don't accurately represent the skill I am desiring to develop this semester. I want to be an active listener in that I can ask questions that prompt reflection or self-problem-solving (if that makes sense). I want to be a deep listener and not just offer solutions or bring my own stories into a conversation that was supposed to be about the other person.

I tend to think of "active" and "deep" listening as exercises contained to one conversation at a time. Often when I decide I am going to work on actively or deeply listening I have this distracting dialogue going in my head of "am I actually listening well? What do I say next to prompt reflection? How can I give them a good solution and find a way to make them think it is their own solution?" etc. My own thoughts become too loud for the exercise to be of any success and I end up exhausted from it and discouraged from making it a habit. I want to become a better listener not by consciously "practicing" on particular conversations but just by having genuine interest in the people around me and having a longing to know their stories.

I guess the term I think is most accurate is that I want to be an "absorbent listener." I want to develop a natural tendency to really hear what my friends are saying - not just the words that come out of their mouths but also the way they say those words. I have learned so far that there is a great deal of significance to what stories a person chooses to tell about their experiences. I want to recognize the significance of the parts of their stories they choose to tell.

I talked to a girl last night who is a freshman at Tech and asked her what she liked to do. She mentioned that she liked to play tennis with her dad and that every summer she goes to New England to a tennis camp with her cousins. She talked about how she is the youngest of her siblings and so her cousins (who are younger) often feel like her little brothers and sisters and that she loves being around them. It was fascinating to me (after our conversation yesterday morning) that her entire life has millions of stories and when I asked her about her life she chose one small aspect of all the magnitude of possibilities. Instead of choosing to say, "I like tennis," she chose to tell the story behind it. I learned not only that she likes tennis but that she is close with her dad, enjoys spending time with him, has family in New England, values her relationships with her cousins, and she has older siblings. This doesn't mean her mom is insignificant in her life, that her other cousins who don't play tennis aren't important, or that she doesn't like other sports besides just tennis. The significance is that the fact that she did mention these things gives me an opportunity next time I see her to dig deeper, ask more questions, and start from something that I already know is important to her.

When talking with my grandmother last night I explained a little bit about my conversation with you and told her that based on knowing her my whole life I can tell one of the most important things in her life is the relationship she had with her mother. Almost every time I talk to my grandma she relates something I say to "when my mother was alive..." Believe it or not she actually started crying on the phone and told me about how one of the reasons she is so comfortable talking to me about her mom is that I remind her so much of her (my great grandmother). She started telling me all of the things that make me like her - her mannerisms, her chin, her gentleness, her laugh. Without meaning to I awakened a conversation with my Grandma that she often sprinkles into our talks but gave her the opportunity to really expose her memories and open up to me.

I am looking forward to adopting this method of listening - I am sure it will be a conscious effort at first but I hope at some point I develop the ability to be aware of not only the words people are telling me but also the significance of them choosing those particular words.