Are you listening to understand, or to talk?

When was the last time you had a great conversation? Think about what made it great for a minute. I don’t know the topic, or who the conversation was with, but I’m willing to bet that a defining characteristic of that conversation was the other person listening to understand — asking insightful questions; giving you space to talk; being deeply engaged in what you were saying; and ultimately making you feel heard. To the person on the other end of that conversation, we salute you!

Contrast that with the act of listening that most of us are engaged in, most of the time — listening to talk. Now if you’re asking yourself what that means and if it applies to you, then consider if you’ve done any of the following recently (I know I have!):

• You asked somebody’s name, or something about them and failed to take in the response properly as you were too busy thinking about what you were going to say next and listening for opportunities to say it
• You spent time in a meeting listening for your opportunity to interject with a comment or question
• You had a heated debate with a family member about different political views and spent the entire time waiting to jump in with your next killer point

Sound familiar? Perhaps there are other applicable examples you can think of. The point is that it’s not uncommon and it doesn’t make you a bad person — we live in a broadcast age, where many speak but few are heard, so it’s understandable that listening has become such a dying skill.

The good news though is that like any skill, listening can be learnt and practised. Here are just a few simple principles which can be applied to any number of conversations in your day-to-day life:

• Generating curiosity — go into everyday conversations with a mindset of ‘if I listen carefully here, I might learn something new and interesting.’ If you’re not curious, you won’t truly listen.
• Talk less than the other person — in a coaching conversation I might do 10% of the talking and my client does 90%. In everyday conversations, you might not see those kinds of extremes, but if you want to practice listening then ask questions, but aim to do less than 50% of the talking.
• Allow space for silence — this can be deeply uncomfortable for a lot of people, but try to avoid filling the silence. One simple tactic here is if you feel the urge to jump in to fill the silence, then pause and count to 5 in your head — either the other person will continue, or you say something after the pause.
• Clear your head of your own agenda — this links closely to generating curiosity. By approaching a conversation from the perspective of trying to learn, rather than trying to influence, you can avoid some of the internal monologue that goes on when we’re trying to steer the conversation.
• Take it all in — body language, tone, pauses, where people look. I don’t mean being weirdly intense and staring at them throughout, but just try to notice what else might be going on as they talk.

All of these principles can be applied in everyday life but I’m also going to give you one (slightly unusual) ‘exercise’ you can do with friends or family. The background here is that me and a group of my closest friends have a long-standing tradition of a monthly dinner. It’s a purely social thing but we’re a close group so we talk about all sorts — from good TV we’ve watched recently through to the meaning of life. At one of these dinners, my friend raised the topic of people’s daily routine — how we all know roughly what other people do with their days, but so much of the detail is missing, so you never really get to understand the nuts and bolts of how people other than you actually spend their time. This kickstarted an entire evening (and we’ve done it more than once over the years since) of quizzing each other on the minutiae of our daily routines. Everyone had about 30 minutes in the spotlight, during which time we tried to find out all the intricate details of their day:

• What time do they wake up?
• Do they set an alarm? Do they snooze it?
• What do they do when they first get up?
• Do they shower first, then brush their teeth?
• What do they eat for breakfast? When? Do they eat breakfast at all?
• When do they start work?
• Do they take breaks throughout the day? If so, what do they do with those breaks?
• What does a typical morning at work look like?
• Etc.

You name it, we asked it. To be clear, at the time this wasn’t an intellectual exercise to explore the art of active listening, it was just curiosity about something as mundane as daily routine; but in hindsight, it’s actually a great way to put those principles of listening to understand into practice.

However you put it into practice, I firmly believe that developing your listening skills can be a true superpower, as it lies at the heart of the most meaningful human connections. So spend time investing in it — listening more and talking less — and see what the power of great listening unlocks for you.

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You can find me and more details about my work as a coach at www.sebagertoft.com