Turn on our listening ears
Turn on our listening ears – this was the key lesson from our time with international disaster recovery expert Elizabeth McNaughton.
Queensland has—touch wood—had a quieter summer so far in terms of natural disasters. Although with heavy rains and storm cells across the state, we may not quite be out of the woods yet.
As we, at QFVG, are one of several organisations who work alongside farmers in disaster recovery, Queensland Famers’ Federation’s (QFF) Farm Business Resilience team invited us, along with members of councils, NRM groups and innovation hubs, to a workshop in Kalbar ahead of the 2024/5 storm season in October.
Workshop facilitator Elizabeth McNaughton has a decades’ long career working across the Asia Pacific on recovery management following events including the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and 2011 Canterbury earthquakes.
Whether you work alongside farmers like we do, or you’re a farmer yourself, Elizabeth’s lessons can prepare you to support your team, business, or community.
These lessons aren’t about the practicalities of disaster recovery, they are about listening—to ourselves and to the people we strive to support.
Listening to ourselves is something to be done pre-disaster. It’s about stepping back before being called into action, assessing our personal state-of-mind, and our ability to lead teams who facilitate disaster recovery.
As Elizabeth said, we lead people to where we are. So it’s important to be physically and mentally calm, clear, and prepared.
Then, when we are called upon for disaster recovery, we need to listen to the people who are trying to recover and rebuild.
Effective listening is a true skill and harder than you might think! When was the last time you tried listening to understand rather than listening to respond?
If you haven’t tried just listening without imparting your own thoughts recently – try it for five minutes as we did with Elizabeth. Ask someone to talk, put on a timer and really listen.
Just listening, and only asking questions for the purpose of gathering more information is tough. You may find yourself wanting to jump in and give advice.
While our ‘advice’ may be well-intentioned, in many cases it’s not what people recovering from disaster need.
Turning on our listening ears is a tricky one; it’s a skill we should practice often. That adage about having two ears and one mouth so we listen twice as much as we talk was on the money.
