Basically, a therapist tries to get at the patient’s viewpoint. The professional listener says: “I am totally listening to everything that you say. You are not totally committed, nor do you need to be, to listen to everything that I say. You might hear many things that I say, that you say, or you might hear little of both. But we are each engaged in arranging different things. You are in a process of rearranging and integrating your new perceptions and calling attention to new ones for you to arrange and integrate.

Paying attention to the present moment without letting your thoughts and ideas about the past and the future get in the way is essential. Why? Because it makes room for the views of others. It allows us to begin to trust them - and, more important, to hear them. It makes us willing to experiment, and it makes it safe to try something that may fail. It encourages us to work on our awareness, trying to set up our own feedback loop in which paying attention improves our ability to pay attention. It requires us to understand that to advance creatively, we must let go of something. As the composer Philip Glass once said, “The real issue is not how do you find your voice, but ... getting rid of the damn thing.

We live in a world increasingly preoccupied with information or data. We attach value to the accumulation of more and more information. We believe that this will grant us greater control over the circumstances of our lives, or enable us to reach beyond ourselves.

In the moment when the thinker looks back at the listener, they register the degree of accuracy in the listener’s response to their signals. They see that response in the thinker’s eyes and face. And here’s the bombshell: the degree of accuracy of the listener’s response to the signals may determine the level of psychological safety for the thinker. The more accurate the listener’s response, the more convincingly the thinker reads, ‘You matter.’ And the better they think.

So it could be said that the definition of truly generative attention, the thing that makes generative attention generative, is the perfectly calibrated eye-and-face response by the listener to the micro signals in the eyes and face of the thinker. The more accurate, the more generative.

The listener’s accurate response to the thinker’s changes seems to raise the quality of attention to a generative zenith. And even more extraordinary things seem to happen for the thinker because of it.

You said it yourself. I always noticed them. I noticed them because I couldn’t help it. Only from the inside can you know what it’s like from the inside. Understanding isn’t just knowing or learning what it is but knowing what it’s like.