14: Developing Listening Skills
A great deal of emphasis in communication skill development is spent on speaking - and the other half of communication is listening, which is sorely neglected. It is assumed that people can listen simply because they have the natural ability to hear - but merely hearing someone speak is not the same as listening to what they say, just as seeing a book is not the same as reading it.
In communication, the point is to say something that is relevant to the other person - and you do not know what might be relevant unless you listen to what the other person has said and respond appropriately. If what you say does not account for what they have said, you are not communicating with them, but merely talking at them, and for all intents ignoring them.
Listening to others is critical to building trust. The author quotes an account of an encounter with a leader, who "looked me in the eyes and seemed to have a greater interest in what I was saying. His gaze never left me. He made me feel like the most important person in the room at the time." Even without saying a word, the leader earned trust and admiration, simply by listening and showing interest.
Why Are We Bad Listeners?
Part of the reason that we are such poor listeners is that we have the ability to process speech faster than we can speak. The typical speaking rate ranges from 120 to 180 words per minute - but we have the ability to comprehend speech, without loss of comprehension, at more than three times that speed. So our brains have a lot of unused capacity when we listen and our minds wander.
An analogy is a job where you are given a task every five minutes that takes only two minutes to perform, and then a three-minute wait for the next task. Sooner or later we begin to occupy ourselves with other things during those three minutes, and are become so absorbed in the time-fill activities we do not notice when the next task arrives.
The problem becomes worse with listening, because the "task" will not wait for us to pay attention. When you lose the thread of conversation, you have difficulty understanding what is said because the words you have ignored were necessary to understanding what comes next.
Another major reason that we have poor listening skills is that we are more concerned with what we want to say than with what the other person is saying. Rather than listening to them, we are planning our next salvo in the conversation - and because we have not listened, what we say is often clearly irrelevant to what we have just been told.
This, in particular, is the reason communication so often fails: unless you listen effectively, you cannot speak effectively.
Improving Your Listening
The author attempts to qualify what he means by "good listening"
One distinguishing characteristic of a good listener is that they attempt to form an overall impression of what the speaker is attempting to say. Poor listeners key in on specific words or phrases but miss the overall meaning the speaker is attempting to convey.
Another characteristic is that good listeners pay attention to nonverbal components of the message: they not only get the message, but a sense of the way the speaker feels about what he is saying to them. This is used to interpret the overall message.
(EN: In fact, most people speak very sloppily, in that they have a general sense of what they mean to convey but are not very adept at choosing the right words to say it - so in many instances the precise details do not matter.)
A final characteristic of good listeners is that they are critical about what they hear. In attempting to decipher the message, they ask themselves questions: Does this sentence make sense in terms of the overall message? It's not the same as building a counter-argument or looking for holes in the speaker's logic, but trying to reconstruct the speaker's argument in a way that it can be understood by the listener.
These three characteristics cause a good listener to devote his full attention to what someone else is saying: the "excess" brain capacity that is not needed to understand the words someone is saying is tasked to understand what they mean.
Developing Listening Skills Using Emotions
When we listen, we are naturally inclined to react to what we hear: our posture and expressions provide feedback to the speaker. Through our expression and posture, we indicate that we understand (or not), agree with the speaker (or not), are comfortable with what he has said (or not), etc.
(EN: One issue I have with much of the advice on listening is that it encourages people to fake these signals to speakers. In effect, those courses train people to pretend to listen when they are really not listening.)
When we speak to someone, we are also naturally inclined to pay attention to how they are listening an craft the message based on the feedback we are receiving from them. To slow down and rephrase if they don't understand, or to choose words carefully if they seem to be hostile to the message.
If the goal of speaking is to get the listener to understand and accept what we are saying, it is critical to read and react to this feedback, and to speak in a manner that ensures they understand and accept - even if this means making tactical changes to what we are saying to arrive at that goal.
Insofar as public speaking is concerned, we must do the same thing when we are not being heard: to change the message to regain attention and move the audience to an emotional comfort zone where they are attentive to the message.
This is the reason that reading from a script is so ineffective: a speaker must be flexible in responding to audience feedback. And a professional speaker, who delivers the same speech many time, revises it constantly in reaction to audience feedback.
Providing Feedback: An Exercise in Active Listening
Another great way to develop listening skills is to provide feedback. This is a common practice in the Toastmasters speaking clubs, in which speakers learn from one another - the audience observes the speaker to appreciate the techniques he uses that work well, and they provide feedback to the speaker on things that could use improvement.
When you are watching someone do something with the intent of giving feedback afterward, you pay closer attention to what they are doing. When this is applied to public speakers, you become more attentive to the speech: what is being said, how it is being said, and all the nonverbal accompaniments. Simply stated, you listen better.
The point is not to give feedback to everyone who speaks to you - that would be obnoxious - but if you listen to them as if you were going to critique their speech, you pay much closer attention.
As an aside, receiving feedback is also valuable: ask members of the audience whether they enjoyed your speech, and they will tell you what you did well. Most audience members will not give negative feedback, as that is considered rude, so you may need to enlist a colleague to observe the speech and give you notes afterward.
Receiving Feedback
There's also a bit about receiving feedback openly (don't automatically disagree and disregard) and interpreting what feedback means (rather than taking it at face value). A person may recognize that they found your opening lines uninteresting, but doesn't necessarily know why. They might say "it started off slow" when speed is not really the problem.
There likely was a problem that could be addressed, but the nature of the problem and the solution are not exactly what people described. So "started off slow" might indicate that you misinterpreted the audience's initial emotional state, or the story you told didn't have enough conflict, or something else entirely.
Be in the Moment: A Mind Free of Thought
The author mentions the notion of "the moment," which is a major theme of a number of eastern religions, chiefly Buddhism. The notion is that people do not appreciate the moment in which they are living because they are distracted by something that happened in the past or are anticipate something that may happen in the future - and as such they are not appreciative of the moment in which they are at the present. They pass their entire lives never paying attention to where they are at any given time.
Particularly in western culture, the art of doing nothing is not only unappreciated, but discouraged. The imperative is to be doing something at every moment, or if there is nothing to do, reflect on what you've done or plan what you're going to do next. As such, many westerners are acculturated to avoid being in the moment, and it takes effort to pay attention to the present moment.
The author speaks of the benefits of meditation, which comes and goes as a fashion in the west. Clearing your mind of the past and future to focus on the present is a valuable mental exercise, and one he encourages.
For a speaker, being in the moment is a valuable skill - to observe the audience and respond nimbly. There is some thought of the future, but if you are overly focused on your next line, you will fumble with the present one. And while the past intrudes, allowing yourself to become distracted by a word you mispronounced a moment ago makes it all the more likely you will make another mistake because you're thinking about what you said (which cannot be improved) rather than what you are saying.