In my careers as a social worker, a facilitator, a visual storyteller, and a documentary filmmaker, the consistent thread has been LISTENING. While I have listened and made my listening process manifest in different ways, the LISTENING has been my primary purpose, role, and responsibility throughout my adult life. I take it seriously—and I am continually trying to hone my practice and craft as a listener.
Listening is an intention and a choice. It is also a competency and a skill. I don’t believe that good listeners are just born that way. I don’t believe that we are good listeners or we aren’t. However, I do believe that we have to want to become better at listening. We have to commit ourselves to understanding how we listen and how others listen. We need a more sophisticated vocabulary to describe listening so that we can better understand the universe of listening and our place in it. Am I an empathic listener? A transactional listener? A social listener? A systemic listener? A synthetic listener? Do I even know what those listening modalities mean?
I call myself a “public listener.” Just like there are public speakers who inspire, provoke, educate, and connect with others through speaking, I work with groups to help them inspire, provoke, educate, and connect with others through their listening.
As a GRAPHIC FACILITATOR, I listen deeply in group conversations for the themes, ideas, questions, points of convergence and divergence, and threads of continuity that emerge from those conversations. While graphic facilitation (also known as graphic recording, visual scribing, strategic illustration, or some combination of similar words) is a visual practice that is rich with imagery and text, it is primarily a listening function for me. I am listening on behalf of the group to help them see ideas come to life, identify the