Printed from Motivate, August 2013
Listen Up!
Listening is
active, while
hearing is
passive.
Julian Treasure,
sound expert
We’ve all been on the receiving end of poor listening, and felt
unheard and underappreciated. Yet when talking with a skilled
listener, the experience could not be more different – we feel
validated and valued.
Whether we deal with customers on a daily basis
or are required to work in a team as part of our
job, listening well is a skill that many of us could
fine-tune. In today’s frantic workplace, however,
distracted by emails, interruptions, texts, and phone
calls, taking the time to truly hear what someone has
to say has become something of a luxury.
Yet the rewards are many. Effective listening
helps build relationships, solve problems, ensure
understanding and resolve conflicts, which in turn
can mean fewer errors and less time wasted.
How to truly listen
The real point of listening actually has little to do
with the words the other person uses, and more to
do with the underlying meaning.
It’s not hard to make every outward appearance
of listening while just preparing to ‘reload’, says
Educational Psychologist and management coach
Russell Bishop. The ‘reloader’ is listening to prove you
wrong, and is quickly forming their response while
you are still making your point. “The only problem
with this kind of listening, is that very little actual
listening takes place,” explains Bishop. “They may
hear your words, but they surely don’t hear you.”
Are we
losing our
listening?
So with this in mind, what should we do to truly hear
another person?
1.Keep eye contact. Have you ever talked to
someone while their eyes scanned the room?
“In most Western cultures, eye contact is a basic
ingredient of communication,” says business trainer
Dianne Schilling. “Do your conversational partners
the courtesy of turning to face them.”
2.Refrain from judging. Try to avoid focusing
on that inner voice in your head – “well, that was a
stupid move” – as a colleague talks to you. Likewise,
jumping to conclusions or finishing off someone’s
sentences doesn’t allow the other person’s feelings
or thoughts to come out.
3.No interrupting! Hijacking the conversation with
interruptions sends a variety of messages, asserts
Schilling. It can say “I’m more important than you,”
“I don’t really care what you think,” or even “I don’t
have time for your opinion”.
If you’re burning to ask a question, wait for a pause in
the conversation. Simple prompter questions, such
as why? or how? might be all that is required.
Don’t push the speaker too hard. “You’re not
interrogating them,” says Sandi Mann, senior lecturer
In a louder and louder world we are losing our ability to listen,
believes sound expert Julian Treasure. “While we spend
roughly 60 per cent of our communication time listening, we
actually retain only 25 per cent of what we hear,” he says.
And many would agree with his assertion that the art of conversation is gradually being eroded,
replaced by ‘personal broadcasting’ via texting, twitter, and other social media.
The world is now such a noisy place, with visual and auditory stimuli jostling for our attention,
that it’s becoming more tiring to listen. But to lose our listening ability means losing our access
to understanding, says Treasure.
To fine-tune your listening, Treasure recommends the following steps:
1.Silence. Enjoy three minutes a day of silence or quiet, to help recalibrate your ears.
2.The Mixer. Even in a noisy environment, listen to how many individual channels of sound
you can hear.
3.Savouring. Start to enjoy everyday, including mundane sounds such as a tumble dryer or
coffee machine.
4.RASA. From the Sanskrit word for essence, this acronym can help you become a better
listener: Receive (show a willingness to listen); Appreciate (using words such as mmm, oh, ok,
I see); Summarise (briefly, what the person has told you); Ask (clarify through brief questions).
Source: Julian Treasure at www.ted.com
© Copyright Healthworks® 2013.
May not be copied, sold, distributed, reproduced in either part or full in any other form.
Printed from Motivate, August 2013
Listen Up!
It is the province of knowledge
to speak, and it is the privilege
of wisdom to listen.
...continued
Oliver Wendell Holmes
in occupational psychology at the University of
Central Lancashire, UK. “There’s nothing more offputting than someone determined to get the truth
out of you. The main thing is to let them talk.”
Listen to your inner voice
4.Avoid offering advice. Many of us believe that
this is what the speaker is after, but it’s rarely the case.
People will come up with their own solutions. You
could try a question such as “What would you like
to happen?”, or Schilling advises that if you do want
to make a suggestion, at least ask the speaker if they
mind you doing so.
As important as it is to listen well to others, your
own inner voice can be either a force for success
or a source of fear.
5.Pay attention to nonverbals. Even over the
phone, the tone and cadence of a voice will quickly
express mood, while being face-to-face allows you
to detect boredom, irritation or enthusiasm via
expressions around the eyes, slope of the shoulders,
or set of the mouth.
The Power of Empathy
As Australian workplace mediator Caryn
Cridland puts it, “empathy is the social
lubricant. It connects, it binds, it bonds
people together.”
True empathy is listening with your heart
as well as your head. Nowhere is it more
important that in the field of customer
service, where showing empathy to an irate
caller can diffuse their anger and help get
them into a state of negotiation rather than
complaint.
Positive self-talk isn’t the same as mindless positive thinking, says
psychologist Harriet Bralker. What you’re after is accurate, logical self-talk,
but too often the voice we listen to broadcasts repeated, negative messages
based on faulty assumptions or negatively loaded words.
It’s not always easy to tune into your self-talk, let alone correct it. Bralker has
several techniques that can help:
•First, at random times throughout the day, ask yourself: “What am I saying
to myself right now?” Then record your thoughts on paper, and start to
refine your self-talk to make it as accurate as possible.
•Use any uncomfortable emotions or moods as cues. Identify your feelings
as accurately as you can, then ask yourself: “What was I saying to myself
before I started feeling this way?”
•Start to change your inner dialogue by replacing flawed ways of talking to
yourself with better ways.
•The real power of self-talk is its ability to change behaviour. Thinking
correctly may alter your negative moods, but real change will only happen
once you act on your thoughts.
Source: Harriet Bralker at University of California Los Angeles at www.college.ucla.edu
To show empathy, you must put yourself in
the other person’s shoes, allowing yourself to
feel what it is like for them at that moment.
It takes energy and concentration to do this,
but it enables valuable communication like
little else.
You can show empathy by the words you
use: “I can appreciate how you must be
feeling”; “I’m sorry, the delay in delivery must
be very frustrating”.
Main sources: Forbes at www.forbes.com; www.huffingtonpost.com;
www.guardian.co.uk; and Flexible Learning Toolboxes at toolboxes.
flexiblelearning.net.au
© Copyright Healthworks® 2013.
05
May not be copied, sold, distributed, reproduced in either part or full in any other form.