Ten Ways …
to both listen and hear
By Robert Ashton
I met a friend the other day for the first time since last March. He’s CEO of a training company and so has been busy adapting his business to deliver online. As he told me, an unexpected consequence of this has been that free of the constraint of geography; his company is now working nationally. Over a coffee he told me all about how his business was growing, about how his staff had adapted to this new way of working, and how he expected the venture to grow rapidly over the coming few years. Not once did he ask how my various projects were going. I gave
him a couple of clues, thinking this might slow his flow and prompt a question. But he was too keen to talk about the progress he’d made over the past year, to think about enquiring about what had been keeping me busy since we last met. He had forgotten the old adage that we have two ears and one mouth, and should use them in that proportion. The sales training I received 40 years ago taught me that. People like to talk about themselves and if we lead a team, or simply
want to be popular, we need to learn to listen and crucially, hear both what is said and what is implied but unsaid. Here are 10 ways I think might help you become a better listener.
1. Make eye contact - You’d be surprised how many people avoid making eye contact. If you look someone in the eye it shows they have your full attention. Eye contact encourages trust and you’re more likely to hear the truth, rather than what the other person thinks you want to hear.
2. Control the flow – My sales training taught me to use both open and closed questions to direct a conversation. Too many open questions can simply unlock a torrent of words and it will become difficult to remain interested in what is being said. For a conversation to work, it has to be of interest to both participants.
3. Draw lines – Every conversation should have boundaries that are best not crossed. People can reveal quite deep and sometimes troubling things when encouraged to open up. You might be a friend, a colleague or a manager, but you are certainly not a therapist, so don’t allow yourself to get led into offering advice on subjects in which you are not qualified.
4. Hear as well as listen – When younger, I had the annoying habit of asking a question, then formulating my next question in my mind while the other person was replying. This meant I only half heard what was being said and while I asked good questions, people soon bored of answering them because I was not responding fully to what they said. People won’t want to talk to you if they don’t think they have your full attention.
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5. Use silence wisely – I would say this, particularly as I am a Quaker and so very comfortable with silence, but silence is not a void to be filled with sound. Pausing to reflect after the other person has finished speaking shows you are preparing a considered response. It demonstrates that you have been both listening and hearing!
6. Remember body language – If you’re having a difficult conversation, you may well deduce more from the other person’s body language than from what they are saying. To hear and understand what someone is really saying, you also have to see the non-verbal signals they are giving. Non-verbal communication is often unconscious, so reflective of what people are really thinking and feeling.
7. Listen to your instinct – As babies we communicate very effectively in the months before we begin to develop the ability to understand and speak words. As we grow up and mature, those early skills are lost and we become over-reliant on language. But your brain will continue to pick up messages which it translates into intuition or instinct. Learn to trust your inner voice and sense as well as hear.
8. Know when to stop – Our busy lives are packed with things to do, deadlines to meet and appointments to keep. Only you know your agenda for the day, and unless you make it clear to those you speak with that you can only give them so long, they won’t know. There’s nothing feels ruder than the person you’re with looking at their watch and stopping you mid-flow because they have to leave for another meeting.
9. Beware of familiarity – I’ve known my wife for more than 50 years and been married for nearly 40 of them. Our conversations often slip into familiar routines, where answers can be given before the question has been asked. But while we might have had this conversation a thousand times, today the context might be different. It’s so easy to assume we know what’s coming next but actually, we won’t know unless we listen properly and hear what is being said!
10. Ask yourself why – I’ve never been good at small talk. In my view, every conversation should have a purpose beyond filling the time. That purpose might just be to get to know someone better, but my view is that without a goal, you’d both be better off shutting up and doing something else. There has to be a point for a conversation to have meaning.
Writing this checklist reminded me that for some people,
conversing can be quite a challenge. Perhaps they are not confident speaking the language that is being used, or are deaf and lip read. Perhaps worst of all they might be living with dementia, and be rattled if taken far from their comfortable repertoire of phrases. My mother in law, who is now in care, has learned to ask ‘how is the family’, because she can no longer remember our children’s names. Always be sensitive to the barriers others face to effective communication.
Comment section is sponsored by Compound Feed Engineering Ltd
www.cfegroup.com
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