One of the delicious challenges of being a TE teacher is thinking about and talking about the bits that you can’t actually teach! This is because the Thinking Environment as a body of work is what we would call ontological in nature, which means that it is a study of being, and it’s very difficult to teach being. How do you teach being? Being is something that people discover through experience. So when I talk about managing the response stream, the thing that I can’t really teach anyone, but can talk about, hopefully in a way that you can discover it for yourself, is what is happening for you when you are managing the second stream of attention, which is essentially the narrative that you are listening to inside your own head whilst you are listening to someone else.
We know that it’s not possible for you to not have that narrative, and we know that when we talk about managing the three streams of attention, what we say about the response stream is that you are “employing it,” you are giving it something to do which is to be interested in the thinking of the person you are listening to and, in particular, to where that thinking is going, and you are also noticing who you are being. So we are engaging that narrative in a way that we are not normally engaging it when we are listening to people. When we are listening to people in what we call the world of exchange thinking, that narrative is normally, often, dominating our attention – in fact, more of our attention is on what we think about what we are listening to.
When we are listening in the world of exchange thinking, the default listening position is that of listening to reply; a lot of your attention on the internal narrative of what you are listening to as you listen to their thinking will be not only on what you think about their thinking but also on what you want to say in response to it. So much so, we know, that what you want to say in response happens, in the form of an interruption, before they are done with their thinking.
https://youtu.be/EY5bgSbB5Zk?si=EV4vrcGqRzxhZI7N (Watch full video here)
So this work of managing your response stream is one of developing an significant amount of gentle compassion towards the fact that there is this enormous competition going on in your mind, and that as you listen to someone else, you are also listening to yourself—having all sorts of responses to what you are listening to. And sometimes your responses don’t even have anything to do with what they are saying but is, instead, made up of distractions or things that have been triggered.
What I notice as I manage my response stream whilst I am listening to someone else is that it’s a matter of noticing when that response has started to distract me, it has started to dominate my attention, so much so—I think of it like this—that I have started to disappear into my own thoughts. Learning to manage my response stream is to catch the moment when that happens, and instead of berating myself for the fact that it’s happened or getting frustrated with myself—because that’s only going to increase the amount of attention I am actually giving to my own inner narrative—to just catch that it’s happened and bring myself back with a gentle reminder that what my job is in being a thinking partner is to listen to them with genuine interest, not just in what I am hearing them say, but in where their thinking is going.
Because where their thinking is going is somewhere that we don’t know. And if we think we do know where their thinking is going—that is just more of us listening to our response stream—that’s me thinking I know where this person is going! And I don’t—because they don’t—they don’t know where they are going either. Thinking is a creative act. So, it’s to catch ourselves, notice that the distraction has occurred, and to remind ourselves to wonder: “I wonder where they are going now, and now, and now?” And to catch that wave with them.
In fact, we can even think of our attention as the wave, and the thinker is on their surfboard, and that the two of us are working in conjunction for this extraordinary thing called thinking to take place.
From Brave Heart to yours,
Trisha
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