Truly effective and empathetic listening requires discipline
and courage. You have to be willing to embrace
new listening habits. Letting go of old habits
is not always easy, but good listening skills are a major aspect of any thriving
relationship and certainly a factor in being a genuine leader or successful entrepreneur. Whatever your goal, it is worth the diligence to acquire the essential listening
disciplines to turn your listening experiences into opportunities for effective
and genuine communication.
You can start by slowing down. Just because everything around you is happening quickly doesn’t mean you have to follow suit. Apply the brakes! When you take more time to direct your attention to people and situations you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you hear and remember.
Without interest, it is difficult to focus on the subject. When you are very interested in what is being said, good listening usually happens naturally and it takes little effort to hear the message and understand it. However, attentive listening can be challenging when the subject or the speaker does not motivate you.
To build up interest, when you set aside time for preparation, familiarize yourself with the speaker or the person you are going to meet. Study the necessary background of the subject or the preparatory material before listening begins. Of course, this preparation is critical when you are a student going into a lecture or when you are an entrepreneurs who want to make an impact with a client.
Because speakers vary in how they express themselves or have different purposes for expressing themselves, it is even more important to develop adjunctive listening skills that help you to stay tuned in to any speaker or topic. To maintain interest keep an open mind and keep focused on the why. In situations like this, you need to exercise patience with and empathy for the speaker.
Short term preparation might be ensuring you get a good night’s rest and eat in advance so you are not hungry. You can carry emergency snacks to satisfy any last minute hunger urges and water for dehydration. In advance of any listening session, you can check that what you need to take notes is easily accessible so you do not interrupt the listening by fumbling about in search of a pen.
Short-term Preparation is your immediate readiness to listen – distractions locked out, pen in hand, mind cleared of unrelated information, comfortably alert, instant focus on the speaker to absorb the message, including verbal and non-verbal cues.
Avoid negative mannerisms, like fidgeting, snapping a pencil against a book, talking, or anything else that would be annoying or disruptive for the speaker or other attendees. Long term preparation might involve expanding your vocabulary. Learning new words and their meaning enhances your listening skills as well as your conversational skills and reading comprehension.
It is difficult to really listen if you do not adopt a receptive attitude. You can choose to listen. Give yourself a pep talk; make a game of seeing how well you can listen. How often did you attend a function out of a sense of duty and in the end found it enjoyable or profitable? The reason you benefitted is probably that you decided to make the best of the situation.
The opportunity to listen effectively will have passed you by if you allow poor attitude, laziness, bias or listening filters interfere with the value of the message. You cannot evaluate the listening experience or the message until you have heard it, so it is better when you begin with a receptive attitude.
To be an effective listener requires that you focus on the present. That requires you to quiet your mind and hands to focus on what is being said. That being said, your intentions and receptive attitude set the groundwork for relaxation and being able to quiet your mind.
You are a much better listener when you are relaxed. Relaxation and business do mix well.
What calms your nerves? Besides a good night’s sleep, most of us agree that music and a massage can be very relaxing, but as a student or entrepreneur you might not be able to indulge in such activities before every lecture or business meeting. Relaxation can also come from:
The best listeners possess the quality of making the speaker feel like the most fascinating person on the planet. They maintain eye contact and let posture and body language convey their involvement. They encourage the speaker to continue by demonstrating strong listening cues (short exclamations, spontaneous applause, a hand to the heart, a thumbs up, smile, etc.) As good listeners, when it is our turn to speak we should make supportive encouraging comments or ask probing questions that demonstrate our interest and genuine desire to know more.
Often the information you need to hear is mixed in with irrelevant stuff. By paying attention to detail and context you can prioritize the information to identify and retain the most important points. For instance, it is inefficient for students to write down everything they hear in a lecture. They must prioritize which information is the most crucial for later use. In sales, entrepreneurs must prioritize which of their clients’ questions or concerns deserve immediate attention, which can be addressed in due course, or which require further research.
Your thoughts move about much faster than speech so listening requires concentration. The foregoing abilities and disciplines will help you concentrate. Still, before you can concentrate on listening there are other things you must do:
Who does it affect?
You certainly do not want to fall asleep when you should be engaged in listening. If you get drowsy or find yourself drifting away during a listening session, you can:
For the most part people are able to decide what they want to focus their attention on. Here are two exercise to practice concentrating.
Exercises #1 to practice concentrating:
Exercise #2 to practice concentrating
Try this simple experiment to test how staying curious about the object of your attention can prolong your ability to stay focused on it:
You may need to train yourself to get comfortable with silence. Mastering the silence is an important achievement in developing listening skills.
A pause, even a long pause, does not necessarily mean that the speaker has finished. The speaker may need a moment to gather his or her thoughts or emotions and formulate what to say next or to dig deep for a much needed insight. Therefore, it is important to respect any pauses the speaker might need before continuing. Sometimes waiting through the silence gives you a chance to reflect and absorb the message. The speaker might actually be giving you time to reflect on the significance of a statement. Good speakers carefully plan their presentations. They emphasize, repeat and summarize the key points. They pause often which gives their listeners time to process important points.
Usually silence makes people uncomfortable and they jump in to fill the quiet with words, often-extraneous words. You can nod encouragement or offer a gesture of understanding, but you should not interrupt unless invited to do so. If you are tempted to speak, you should be mindful of respecting the other person. Tell yourself, “I need to care about hearing and understanding what she has to say more than I care about her hearing me.”
As a good listener you can utilize pauses to process what was said, make good notes, summarize ideas, or anticipate and formulate questions based on the speaker’s message.
You communicate with other people on many levels. You use your vocal organs to speak, but you communicate with your entire body. What you say and your choice of words is boosted to a different level by the volume, tones, emphasis, nuances of your voice and your body language. An estimated 80% of human communication comes from non-verbal cues – props, facial expressions, posture, gestures, respiration, perspiration, and numerous other body language signals. You derive deeper meaning when you pay attention to and interpret all these communication channels.
More often than not, how another person speaks to you is more impactful than what they say. The expressions and body language tell you important things, such as the real feelings and intentions of the speaker. Unless you take these non-verbal elements into account, you cannot properly understand the conversational use of spoken language.
Maybe one of the most challenging aspects of listening is the ability to link all these pieces of information together to obtain the whole picture.
Non-verbal cues can:
Therefore, you should concentrate to listen to:
There are many different types of non-verbal communication. It takes intense concentration to detect the many cues.
Typically, in business meetings, we expect a respectful dialogue between professionals, yet there are also discussions we would rather avoid. For example, it can be uncomfortable to admit that you are not clear on what the other person said. True you may have missed an important point, but it also could be that the speaker was unclear. When you are unsure, it is never wise to lean toward silence, which tends to send the wrong message. The other person might assume you have not listened or that you processed everything with ease. Asking for clarification shows the speaker that you are interested and want to understand. It is a sign of respect.
When you yourself in such a situation, it is imperative that you are able to restate what you understand to ensure that you are in agreement with the speaker so there is no doubt about what needs to happen next.
In certain situations, such as in a classroom or business meeting it is helpful to make notes so you do not forget what is important to clarify.
One attribute that defines an exceptional listener is the ability to examine a listening experience. After an interaction they make it a habit to ask themselves questions to figure what worked well and what aspects of the experience could have been made better so that they can make adjustments in their behaviours to improve. They analyze their motivations, the depth of their understanding, as well as the distractions. They want to know that other person was heard and understood, so they examine the type and quality of their questions as well their responses. When they lack understanding they follow-up with questions or ask for clarification. If they feel they fell short of showing proper respect or professionalism they take steps to remedy the matter as soon as possible.
