Guidelines for Listening
1. Take time to become settled in God’s presence.
2. Listen to others with your entire self (senses, feelings, intuition, and rational faculties).
3. Speak for yourself only, expressing your own thoughts and feelings, referring to your own experience. Avoid being hypothetical.
4. Do not challenge what others say.
5. Do not interrupt.
6. Do not formulate what you want to say while someone else is speaking.
7. Pause between speakers to absorb what has been said.
8. Listen to the group as a whole, to those who have not spoken verbally as well as to those who have; generally, if you have already spoken, leave space for anyone who may want to speak a first time before speaking a second time.
*From Grounded in God: Listening Hearts Discernment for Group Deliberations, Suzanne G. Farnham, Stephanie A. Hull, R. Taylor McLean (Morehouse Publishing, 1996) pp. 55–56.