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Tip 31 – Enhancing your listening skills
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When he was a US Senator, Lyndon Johnson had a plaque on his office wall that read, "You ain't learnin' nothing when you're talking."
This principle has been extended further by Stephen Covey. The 5th habit of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is ‘seek first to understand, then to be understood.’ According to Covey, most people listen only in a superficial way because they are already thinking about and preparing their reply before the speaker has even finished talking. Effective communication requires a shift to what Covey calls ‘empathic listening’. In order to truly understand what someone is saying, you also need to understand their perspective and frame of reference.
In empathic listening, you listen with your eyes and your heart. You listen for feeling, for meaning. You use your right brain as well as your left. You sense, you intuit, you feel. Empathic listening is powerful because it gives you more accurate data to work with.
Here are some tips to help become a better empathic listener…
Listen for ideas and central themes. Seek to understand the speaker’s central theme or main points instead of getting lost in, or just reacting to, the supportive details.
Judge content, not delivery. Focus on what the speaker is saying and try not to be unduly influenced by his or her way of saying it.
Put yourself in their shoes. If you want to understand where a speaker is coming from, you have to see things from their perspective and frame of reference.
Don’t jump to conclusions. It’s easy to assume that you know the rest of a sentence or message after hearing the beginning. Avoid prejudging a message, so you can receive and evaluate all of it.
Concentrate and resist distraction. External distractions include non-related things you can see or hear, or which may be impacting your other senses. Internal distractions occur when your mind wanders into unrelated memories or shifts its focus to worries, plans or anticipations.
Use the fast pace of thought to your advantage. Most people can think three or four times faster than they speak. Don’t let your quick mind indulge in all sorts of thoughts unrelated to the conversation, or by trying to prepare a reply in your head while you are trying to listen.
Check your emotions. It has been said that the intellect is a slave to emotions. Be sensitive to things that trigger your emotions and increase your efforts to focus on a clear reception and understanding of what is being said.
Work at listening. Be an active listener by asking questions and seeking clarification, whether or not you agree with what’s being said.
What to avoid
What should we look out for in ourselves and avoid? Here are some of the habits that can get in the way of good verbal communication.
Filtering. This is when a person's mind is sifting through another's words and tuning in only when he or she hears agreement. Commonly, a Filterer replies to someone else's statements with "yeah, but…."
Second Guessing. Someone who is second guessing usually misses important details because they are too busy (a) imagining someone has hidden motives for saying what they're saying, and (b) trying to figure out what those hidden motives might be.
Discounting. This often occurs when a listener lacks respect for a speaker. What the speaker is saying could be 100% correct, but a Discounter will either internally or publicly scoff at what's being said, for any number of reasons. The sad thing about Discounters is that they often miss the solutions to the problems before them, simply because they don't like the source.
A milder form of discounting occurs when content is brushed off just because the speaker has difficulty expressing themselves.
Relating. A Relater is someone who continually finds references from his or her own background and compares them to what the speaker is saying. Relaters often appear self - centred, as everything they hear is publicly compared or contrasted to his or her own experiences.
Rehearsing. This habit blocks much listening as it is simply waiting for the other speaker to finish what he or she is saying so the Rehearser can start talking again. While someone else is talking, the Rehearser is thinking about how to say the next sentence. Different from the Filterer in that the other party may actually be agreeing with the Rehearser, but any words other than the Rehearser's own are just noise.
Forecasting. Someone who takes an idea from the speaker and runs light years ahead of the topic at hand is forecasting. Forecasting can stem from being bored with the subject matter, or simply because one's mind automatically thinks ahead.
Placating. One of the worst of all listening habits, placating agrees with everything anyone else says, just to avoid conflict.
By listening empathically, a coach can help you on many levels.