Marcia McReynolds Journey to Becoming a Listener

I used to be a really bad listener, unconscious of how much I made conversations all about me, until I was press-ganged into becoming a mediator.

I cried that first night of training when they had us silently listen to one another, without saying a word in return. Not because I was so bad at listening, but because of  the power of being listened to. And I cried because I realized the reason so many of my relationships were in shambles, including the one with my then 13 year old daughter, was because I didn’t really know how to listen.

My path to becoming a more open, aware listener has segued into my path to teach listening. Being a teacher is an automatic process in me, so when I learn something myself I am also mentally recording how I got there so I can teach it later, leaving little lesson breadcrumbs along the way. So when I teach I am teaching from my own experience of learning, from the inside out, using my once being bad at something to the advantage of my students. I know how hard it is to undo old habits, and how gratifying and life-changing it is to change them. I see teaching listening as the contribution I can make to help heal the earth.  So far I have directly taught in the vicinity of 14,000 people how to really listen to one another.

In addition to teaching listening I teach  “improvisation for life and theater”, acting, and mediation for managers at Clark College in Vancouver, WA.  For 11 years I  have voluntarily mediated 100’s of cases for Community Mediation Services with the City of Vancouver. For thirty years I have pioneered the work of applied improvisation, facilitating thousands of diverse people to people think out of the box, feel confident, make good choices, and feel creative.  I have won awards as an educator.  I am also an improvisational and script actor, director, a writer,  a storyteller and My favorite pastimes is  improvisational singing. I have been told I am a pretty good listener as well. 

I have a BA in theater education and education from Virginia Commonwealth and a Master’s degree in Education from Colorado State University.

I can be pretty funny, playful, exuberant and irreverent.  I can also be quite reverent, and a very good friend to those I know. People come to me when they have important decisions to make, to “get a listen,” or to work out some communication or anger issue they may have with another person. I volunteer a great deal of my time to just listening to people, anywhere, because I  feel listening is a way to world peace, one person, on workshop, one deck of Listening Cards at a time.

I decided I am a “visceralizing spiritualectual.”  This may sound pretty woo woo but I tend to be in touch with the energy in the body, feeling and seeing what is inside and around. Everything is energy, and having a pretty well-developed right brain, I see ideas, images, visions, and feel them in my body, a process I call “visceralizing.” I am passionately interested in the process of being human, especially our mind body connection and how we interrelate.  My gift,  I believe,  is insightful and educated curiosity about how humans think, learn, evolve, and communicate (or don’t). I combine this insight and knowledge to help others get in touch with what is real and true inside them.  
I am passionately pragmatic about the art of living, working to get to what is vital to live in a-core-dance with the heart of life.
 My creed is simple: God is love. I believe we are in this life to learn to love, the simplest and yet the hardest thing to learn. I see listening as the primary skill of loving.

So if Ms. Chatterbox can learn to listen, so can you.  I often say I teach listening so I have people to listen to me 

My Conversion to Really Listening

My listening conversion began 10 years ago.  Before that I seemed to have a “small piece of fluff in my ears” which kept me from truly hearing others. My relationships with family and friends were stuck and unhealthy. I found communication with most people boring. Some people found me insufferable in my “thorough hold on a conversation,” even though I thought I was brilliant.  I was lonely though I had people around me. I craved deeper connectedness. I took all sorts of find-myself workshops to temporary avail. At one point the chasm of emptiness inside almost swallowed me whole.

Then, reluctantly, at the bidding of a friend, I trained to become a volunteer mediator. For the first time in my fairly educated life, I was trained in the skills of really listening. I became uncomfortably aware of my inability to listen, and of my habits that blocked me from truly hearing others. I was also so deeply moved by the power that being really listened to had on me, that I committed myself to the discipline of becoming a real listener. I began practicing with my then middle school aged daughter, my family and friends, as well as my mediation clients.

Results of Listening

Not only were my relationships with everybody revolutionized by my fledgling steps toward real listening, I found my new mode of communicating a relief.

I now had an option to becoming defensive when someone was mad at me.

I no longer had to come up with a solution to their fix people’s problems because listening gave me a way to help them find a solution themselves.

I became adept at unraveling people’s eccentric, sometimes rambling speaking patterns, making sense of them, even for the speaker.

I began to find other people as interesting as I found myself, relieving me of having to be the center of the conversation (and relieving a few others, too, I imagine.)

Silence in a conversation transformed from 10 seconds of hell to a chapel where the angels could be heard.

Overall, I became calmer, even when I wasn’t engaged in listening. I began to feel that I could be of service to the world, not just through doing, but by being; I found that my deepening sense of presence alone was solace for people.

Meeting with Gandhi and Nobel Peace Laureates

In the midst of this conversion I met Arun Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson, after a talk he gave in Portland. I was in the receiving line rehearsing nervously, self-consciously, what I was going to say about some wild-haired idea I had of bringing him to work with youth in the community. I felt stupid, ridiculous, presumptive. I was sure he would patronize me, be aloof, and brush me off with a “contact-my-secretary.” 

But when it was my turn, I found, instead, his eyes, these moist, kind, empty-but-for-love, receptive eyes, holding me, asking me to say what was in my heart. He didn’t look through me, or cuttingly into me; he looked with me at what I was seeing inside me. I was able to guide him on a tour of my heart’s wishes. I felt comfortable with him in my heart. For the first time in my life I felt whole, enough, credible, o.k.

His listening empowered me to find the money to bring him and people from the Gandhi Institute to my town to work with youth and adults.  Since then, for seven years,  I have had the honor of bringing Nobel Peace Laureates to my town to work with youth. Each one of those laureates, Betty Williams, Maraied Currigan MacGuire, Rigoberto Menchu, Oscar Arias, Jose Ramos Horta, Jaime Eschevel, the Dalai Lama, all have had that same way of listening, of making you feel as if you were the only person there in a roomful of people. I believe that their ability to listen is what enabled them to bring peace to their corners of the world.

Marcia McReynolds dream is to teach as many people as possible all over the world to learn to listen.

What about you?

What would happen if you brought this kind of calm attention to bear on the people in your life?  How might they speak to you differently? What kinds of things might they tell you? How would the nature of your relationships change?  

And what do you need? Aren’t most of us just seeking a neutral sounding board, someone who we can bounce things off of without having to get into their personality’s needs? Don’t we all want a wise, centered presence who helps us feel whole again by really listening to us?

I want you to bring peace to your corner of the world. By becoming a deep, real listener, you can empower those around you to become the best people they can be. You, in turn, through the discipline of really listening, will become a better person. And eventually, through your example, others will begin really listening to you.

The Mission

I am convinced that really listening is the fulcrum of world peace. I have a mission: to spend the rest of my life teaching as many people as possible how to listen. My hope is that just by applying these cards to your own listening, you will be motivated to join me on the lifelong quest of becoming a master listener yourself.

Marcia McReynolds, a.k.a,

"The Listening Lady."