Hey there! Here’s one leadership idea and one resource I’ve found beneficial this week:
1 idea: Listening as hospitality
One of my heroes is Henri Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest who gave up fame as a Harvard Divinity School professor to live alongside adults with developmental disabilities. His writings on leadership, faith, and vulnerability are dear to me because they reorient me to what is most important in life.
In his incredible book Reaching Out, Nouwen explores why listening is hospitality and hospitality heals:
When we take the word diagnosis in its most original and profound meaning of knowing through and through (gnosis = knowledge; dia = through and through), we can see that the first and most important aspect of all healing is an interested effort to know the patients fully, in all their joys and pains, pleasures and sorrows, ups and downs, highs and lows, which have given shape and form to their life and have led them through the years to their present situation. This is far from easy because not only our own but also other people's pains are hard to face. Just as we like to reach our own destination through bypasses, we also like to offer advice, counsel and treatment to others without having really known fully the wounds that need healing.
But it is exactly in this willingness to know the other fully that we can really reach out to him or her and become healers. Therefore, healing means, first of all, the creation of an empty but friendly space where those who suffer can tell their story to someone who can listen with real attention.
It is sad that often this listening is interpreted as technique. We say, "Give him a chance to talk it out. It will do him good." And we speak about the "cathartic" effect of listening, suggesting that "getting it out of your system" or "getting it out in the open" will in itself have a purging effect. But listening is an art that must be developed, not a technique that can be applied as a monkey wrench to nuts and bolts. It needs the full and real presence of people to each other. It is indeed one of the highest forms of hospitality.
Why is listening to know through and through such a healing service?...
Just as teachers learn their course material best during the preparation and ordering of their ideas for presentation to students, so patients learn their own story by telling it to a healer who wants to hear it. Healers are hosts who patiently and carefully listen to the story of the suffering strangers. Patients are guests who rediscover their selves by telling their story to the one who offers them a place to stay....
As healers we have to receive the story of our fellow human beings with a compassionate heart, a heart that does not judge or condemn but recognizes how the stranger's story connects with our own.
Nouwen ends with a provocative question that we should each ask ourselves today:
Our most important question as healers is not, "What to say or to do?" but, "How to develop enough inner space where the story can be received?" Healing is the humble but also very demanding task of creating and offering a friendly empty space where strangers can reflect on their pain and suffering without fear, and find the confidence that makes them look for new ways right in the center of their confusion.
***
What keeps me from creating inner space to hear the stories of others?
How can I let go of the fear and judgment that prevents me from hearing others fully?
Which of my colleagues, friends, or family members would benefit from some of this healing space today?
1 resource: Reaching Out
Nouwen’s powerful book is one I recommend a lot. It’s a book you’ll find yourself reading and re-reading slowly—not because it’s dense or poorly written, but because it contains deep truth that merits careful reflection.
You can find the book on Amazon or wherever books are sold.
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