It is commonly acknowledged that reskilling will need to take place as we move towards a more sustainable economy and lifestyles. And there is one key skill that I believe we need to grow and nurture: listening.

A friend of mine was struggling with a problem. As a committed environmentalist, he just didn’t know how to communicate with his neighbours who seemed to be the antithesis of everything that he stood for.  They owned a sports car and seemed to fly to Spain every other weekend. He wanted to share his passion and concern for the environment for them, encourage them to move towards a greener lifestyle – but the gap seemed to be just too big to breach. Where could he start?

“How about listening?” I suggested, in a moment of inspiration. “There will be something that they are passionate about, and you could start a conversation based around their passions. For example, you might find out that they love good food. This opens up an opportunity to talk to them about food, what you are doing to promote locally grown food, and what the benefits to this are. You are then connecting through something that is important to both of you, and which might then start to open the door for further conversations.”

He listened. “I can really see how that would work. It is not just a matter of me talking at them, as that is just going to make them defensive. I was seeing them as the enemy before, and that is confrontational.”

My friend and I are members of Transition Waltham Forest, part of the Transition Towns (www.transitiontowns.org) movement which seeks to inspire, catalyse and support community responses to Peak Oil and climate change. And I immediately began thinking, ‘How can we translate the listening principle across the whole of the community where we live?’ One of the key principles of Transition Towns is ‘positive visioning’, seeking to generate positive new stories which explore practical new visions of the future. By visioning, you are beginning the movement towards this vision. It seems to me that visioning in this sense can become listening on a community scale – listening to what matters to individuals and then articulating it as a collective vision.

So maybe it is not just listening, but also visioning, which is a key skill – both for our sustainable future and in order to make it happen. Those of us who are working towards a more sustainable world will often come across those who don’t yet share our passion – whether in the workplace, our friends and family, in the communities where we live. A mix of listening and visioning may be the place to start.

I’ll let you know how my friend gets on in his mission. And if you have any examples of where listening has helped you to get your message across, or of visioning as a driver for change, please do share with us.