Listening Well

...there are a number of specific techniques you can use to improve your skills

Active listening is hard work and starts with your own personal motivation. If you are unwilling to exert the effort to hear and understand, no amount of additional advice is going to improve your listening effectiveness. If you are motivated to become an effective listener, there are a number of specific techniques you can use to improve your skills:

• Make eye contact: this focuses your attention, and reduces the likelihood that you will be come distracted, and encourages the speaker.
• Show interest: use nonverbal signals, such as head nods, to convey to the speaker that you're listening.
• Avoid distracting actions: looking at your watch or shuffling papers are signs that you aren't fully attentive and might be missing part of the message.
• Take in the whole picture: interpret feelings and emotions as well as factual content.
• Ask questions: seek clarification if you don't understand something. This also reassures the speaker that you're listening to them.
• Paraphrase: restate what the speaker has said in your own words with phrases such as "what I hear you saying is..." or "Do you mean...?"
• Don't interrupt: let speakers complete their thoughts before you try to respond.
• Confront your biases: use information about speakers to improve your understanding of what they are saying, but don't let your biases distort the message.

ACTION POINT: Employ the listening skills listed above to improve understanding.

Listening Actively

To listen actively, you must concentrate intensely on what the speaker is saying

Many communication problems develop because listening skills are ignored, forgotten, or taken for granted. Active listening is making sense of what you hear. It requires paying attention and interpreting all verbal, visual, an vocal stimuli presented to you. Active listening has four essential ingredients: concentration, empathy, acceptance, and taking responsibility for completely understanding the message.

To listen actively, you must concentrate intensely on what the speaker is saying and tune out competing miscellaneous thoughts that create distractions. Try to understand what the speaker wants to communicate rather than what you want to understand. Listen objectively and resist the urge to start evaluating what the person is saying, or you may miss the rest of the message. Finally, do whatever is necessary to get the full, intended meaning from the speaker's message--listen for feelings an content, and ask questions to ensure you understood.

ACTION POINT: Take responsibility to listen actively to completely understand what is being said.

Am I Reader or a Listener?

Far too few people even know that there are readers and listeners and that people are rarely both.

The first thing to know is whether you are a reader or a listener.  Far too few people even know that there are readers and listeners and that people are rarely both.  Even fewer know which of the two they themselves are.  But some examples will show how damaging such ignorance can be.

When Dwight Eisenhower was Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, he was the darling of the press.  His press conferences were famous for their style--General Eisenhower showed total command of whatever question he was asked, and he was able to describe a situation and explain a policy in two or three beautifully polished and elegant sentences.  Ten years later, the same journalists who had been his admirers held President 

Eisenhower in open contempt.  He never addressed the questions they complained, but rambled on endlessly about something else.  And they constantly ridiculed him for butchering the King's English in incoherent and ungrammatical answers.

Eisenhower apparently did not know that he was a reader, not a listener.  When he was Supreme Commander in Europe, his aides made sure that every question form the press was presented in writing at least half an hour before a conference was to begin.  And then Eisenhower was in total command.  When he became president, he succeeded two listeners, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.  Both men knew themselves to be listeners and both enjoyed free-for-all press conferences.  Eisenhower may have felt that he had to do what his two predecessors had done.  As a result, he never even heard the questions journalists asked. And Eisenhower is not even an extreme case of a non listener. 

A few years later, Lyndon Johnson destroyed his presidency, in large measure, by knot knowing that he was a listener.  His predecessor, John Kennedy, was a reader who had assembled a brilliant group of writers as his assistants, making sure that they wrote to him before discussing their memos in person.  Johnson kept these people on his staff--and they kept on writing.  He never, apparently, understood one word of what they wrote.  yet as a senator, Johnson had been superb; for parliamentarians have to be, above all, listeners.

Few listeners can be made, or can make themselves, into competent readers--and vice versa.  The listener who tries to be a reader will, therefore, suffer the fate of Lyndon Johnson, whereas the reader who tries to be a listener will suffer the fate of Dwight Eisenhower.  They will not perform or achieve.

ACTION POINT:  Understand if you are a listener or a reader.