Ever been part of a course of instruction on listening? If not, you’re not alone. In more than three decades of working with teams, I can count on one finger the number of people who’ve taken a class on developing their listening skills.
Time and again, people in management and leadership positions have told me they are good listeners. But, almost always, once these people are put in a position where they must actively listen to someone describe a workplace problem, they don’t do so well.
This is not something I’m inclined to criticize. After all, how can we expect people to do something if they’ve never been taught? And so, assuming that a majority of people reading this are similar to the groups I’ve worked with over the years, consider the following an “Introduction to the Art of Listening.”
Hearing vs. Listening
Let’s start by doing a compare and contrast of hearing and listening.
Hearing is an ability to perceive sounds though vibrations that enter the ear. Providing a person’s ear canal is open, eardrums are intact and the cochlea and auditory nerves are functioning properly, a person should be able to hear sounds.
Listening goes beyond the ability to hear. Listening is a consciously learned skill that involves comprehending, analyzing and interpreting meaning that come from the sounds we hear.
Hearing, by itself, is a subconscious, passive process, whereas listening is a conscious, active process.
We have no need to concentrate when it comes to hearing, and outside of turning off noisemaking devices or moving away from the source of a noise, we have little or no control over the sounds we hear.
On the other hand, purposeful concentration is required for listening, and it requires a heartfelt desire to understand the meaning and purpose of the information being conveyed.
Ways to Listen
Listening can and should occur with more than just ears because we can aid our listening by watching. The most reliable studies tell us that roughly 68 percent of communication is body language and 25 percent is voice tone. That leaves only 7 percent for words. This means that we can listen much better if we can observe a person’s body language.
- Facial expressions offer much information to aid the listener in interpreting and analyzing.
- Hand movements add nuance, too.
- Overall body posture is also informative.
Ask Yourself A Question
Obviously, if we’re truly listening it means we’re not doing much talking. Also, as we focus our attention on another person, we must seek to understand more than just the words we’re hearing. Effective listening requires that we actively seek to understand the thoughts and feelings that are behind the words of the person who is speaking to us.
When doing this, we often arrive at a subjective, educated guess, but it’s the starting point for helping the speaker know that we truly are listening. One question I always recommend a listener ask internally is, “What is this person thinking or feeling?” In other words, listening doesn’t involve only gathering the facts of what’s being said, but the person’s thoughts and/or feelings about it, too.
I cannot stress how incredibly difficult this step can be if the person speaking is bringing up a concern about you or saying something about your work or your team that is patently false. It is also extraordinarily difficult to do if someone is taking a position that runs 180 degrees counter to your value system. Our natural emotional response will be to defend ourselves or defend or correct false statements or defend something we value.
Listening in these situations calls for extreme amounts of control and patience.
One Trick to Extend Your Patience
A common human tendency is to “fix” things and move on. Add to that the fact that some of us process data in a matter-of-fact manner, believing that emotions are just muddy things that get in the way. But here’s the cold hard truth. All humans have emotions, regardless of how stoic they may appear, and emotions can be powerful drivers toward or away from any position.
This means that when one person is listening to another, it is easy to let our emotions get the best of us – to the point that we say things we regret later on.
To this I offer a trick that allows us to bear with the discomfort of feeling attacked if someone is saying something directed at us or our teams, and that trick comes out of Stephen Covey’s 7-Habits book: “Seek First to Understand, Then Be Understood.” Listening is “seeking first to understand.” It’s allowing someone else to be heard – to feel heard – first. The trick is knowing there are two parts, and that you will eventually get your turn to be heard in the second part.
To review: part one of the trick is listening to the other person (seeking first to understand), and the second part of the trick is knowing that you get to present your perspective next (then be understood). The downside is you don’t know how long it will take for the other person to feel truly heard. It could take 10 seconds. I could take 10 hours.
Regardless, think of the trick as exercising patience. Think of it as being mature as we follow solid principles of adult dialog.
Again, in no way is it easy to listen to someone if we’re in a hurry or being pressured or feeling attacked or lied about. But knowing that you will eventually get your turn to present your view of things can be what fills you with enough patience to listen, and listen deeply, all the way through until the other person truly feels heard.
After all, as a common maximum states, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” And we show that we care by listening. Truly listening. Listening by conscious choice not only to another person’s words, but also to the thoughts and feelings behind the words, even if doing so is painful.
And that is the art of listening. •
Daniel Bobinski, who has a doctorate in theology, is a best-selling author and a popular speaker at conferences and retreats. For more than 30 years he’s been working with teams and individuals (1:1 coaching) to help them achieve excellence. He was also teaching Emotional Intelligence since before it was a thing. Reach him by email at DanielBobinski@protonmail.com or 208-375-7606.
