Mastering Active Listening: One Of The Most Powerful Techniques To Enhance Your Interpersonal Communication Skills
Active listening. It’s a bit of a buzz word. Why? Because everyone knows how important it can be. That’s also why it’s a shame it isn’t more prevalent in our interpersonal communications. You have the power to change that for yourself. You can make it your intention to actively listen with ever-increasing skill and frequency. That one decision could not only change your life but perhaps many others. In today’s episode, we will take an in-depth view of active listening in order to move you further on your way to becoming a great thought partner.
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Mastering Active Listening: One Of The Most Powerful Techniques To Enhance Your Interpersonal Communication Skills
Don't you love it when you're talking to someone who seems to misunderstand, discount, or ignore everything you say? You don't? Neither does anybody else. Why would we ever do something like that to other people? It’s a simple question. The answer is anything but. At a minimum, we can at least understand the territory a little bit better. When we do, we can increase our personal power by looking inward and building our ability to give people a precious gift. We can give them our attention and effort to understand their thoughts and feelings.
One of the best ways to accomplish this is to build the skill and habit of active listening. In its most simple form, active listening is focusing on what a person is communicating to us. It's something we often forget to do as we can be habitually wrapped up in our perceptions and opinions. When we do that, we miss an opportunity to meaningfully connect with another human being. Advanced skill in active listening is not so lofty a goal.
In the early 2000s, when my partner and I in our company, The Communication Gym, developed a program and trained people in its use, we found most people could become reasonably proficient relatively quickly. What separated people in terms of real-world improvements in their experience and performance was how diligent they were in building active listening as a habit. This is trickier for the same reason that plagues all habits. They are powerful.
Good ones serve us very well because they keep us on a desired track. Bad ones hurt us badly because they're difficult to change. The habit of active listening is harder than most because it requires a high degree of emotional intelligence to actively listen with consistency. As we get into the components of the skill, we'll see why. Active listening is simple to understand and depending upon the emotional landscape of the people in the conversation can range from effortless to impossible to do.
The habit of active listening is harder than most because it requires a high degree of emotional intelligence to actively listen with consistency.
In this sense, we'll consider it. Active listening is in essence functioning as an effective thought partner for another person. The very first step is always the same, the decision to actively listen. This can be the highest hurdle, especially when we have an emotional stake in the ideas and implications of the shared thoughts. To complete step one, we must not only defeat the power of our habitual preoccupations but also the emotions generated by the situation, relationship, setting, topic, mood, or disposition.
We must have self-awareness which is one of the crucial components of emotional intelligence. We need to be in touch with what's going on in our minds. This leads us to step two where we'll need another important component of emotional intelligence which is the ability to self-regulate. In this case, we need the ability to quiet our thoughts, open our minds, and keep them that way as we leave space for the person to fully express themselves.
By doing so, we cultivate the ability to park our agenda, put it on hold, set it aside, resist the impulses it generates, and adopt a clear and simple independent agenda. We achieve step two when we make our goal to understand as clearly and completely as possible the thoughts and feelings the other person is choosing to share. Look at us. We're already at two of the most crucial steps in the powerful process of being a great active listener. We're halfway there. There are two steps to go. Here's where we can benefit from some additional intentional practice.
Are you ready for step three? This one requires perhaps the most refined skill of the steps. Here, we ask high-quality clarifying questions. Note that I say had quality because not all questions are created equally. Some propel the conversation forward to greater clarity in connection while others can stop dead in its tracks or even be counterproductive.
How do we distinguish between low and high-quality clarifying questions? It begins with the spirit behind our question. If our spirit is aligned with a productive outcome where the texts, pretext, subtext, and context are congruent with a genuine desire to understand and explore, our questions will usually propel the conversation forward.
If we slip and allow our emotions to warp the original agenda of understanding the other person into one that includes our view, we can be perceived as challenging, rejecting, judging, or resisting. None of that is a part of active listening. It may be necessary to go there eventually depending upon circumstances but active listening requires us to put those impulses away, at least for this phase of our interaction.
High-quality questions not only help us better understand what a person is telling us. They also help our conversational partners develop and improve their thoughts and feelings. It is a path of discovery. We provide tremendous value as the person plumbs the depths of the assumptions and perceptions that have inspired their current thoughts and feelings. Most of our difficulties arise from our mental distortions in the completeness of information, context, and misapprehensions.
Active Listening: High-quality questions not only help us better understand what a person is telling us. They also help our conversational partners develop and improve their thoughts and feelings.
When we actively listen with mastery, the result may not be that we agree but it often can improve the clarity of the person's impulses. That can be important or even life-changing. High-quality questions tend to be open-ended and exploratory. Examples include, “What did you see or learn that led you to believe that? When you thought that, what else shifted for you? How does this idea fit with the other ideas you shared?” Another way of asking that one is, “Can you help me see the connections?”
If this assertion was in reality different than you currently perceive it to be, would you wish to know about it? If so, how might that affect the thoughts you have that come from that perception? Our best emotional posture during step three is support, openness, curiosity, and healthy detachment at least for the moment from the implications we perceive that result from what is being shared with us. Do you see what I meant about the utility of high emotional intelligence? It's required to do these things well.
Step four is also crucial. We must prove to the person that they've been heard and understood. We need to reflect their message to them and receive an acknowledgment that their message has been accurately received. It's best to do this in our own words to make sure the message isn't distorted by our unspoken biases. The person will often say, “That's close but not exactly correct.” They can further elaborate and refine their message.
This is a cooperative phase that sharpens the picture for both conversationalists. Discipline here means we don't move on. In other words, offer thoughts of our own until the person tells us they've been understood correctly. The Communication Gym version of the skill and habit of active listening stopped there, the four simple steps. If you're familiar with the Eye of Power Model, you know how big I am on the power of four. It's an optimal blend.
Four elements are often sufficiently complete to usefully describe a concept but sufficiently tight to be wieldy. It’s something we can remember and use in real time in our daily lives. That is my parting thought as it relates to the skill and habit of active listening. Like much of life, it's a use-it-or-lose-it proposition. My suggestion is to pick 1 conversation or 2 every day. Make it your intention to actively listen. Follow the four steps and decide to actively listen. Park your personal agenda, use high-quality clarifying questions, and reflect for confirmation and further clarification.
Make it your intention to actively listen.
To wrap up this discussion of how we master the important life skill of active listening, let's look at some more fundamentals to keep in mind as we go through the four steps. First, pay attention to the body language, both yours and theirs. Make sure you are dialed into them and not looking at your phone for instance. Let them complete their thoughts even if you think you've understood what they're saying.
Remember, this process is just as much for them as it is for you. They'll do much better if they don't sense you're about to cut off ideas before they can even express them. Second, if you wish to be even more intentional about building mastery with this skill, I suggest you keep a log. At the end of each day, report the details of your experience with the active listening conversations you had that day.
You can write answers to the following questions. What did you learn? What was the difficulty the other person had if any? What was the difficulty you had if any? How could the interaction have been improved? How has your perception of the other person and your relationship with them shifted? Over time, you'll be able to discern a journey of your own. As you build this skill and habit, you'll notice powerful or maybe even unexpected dividends. Who knows? Maybe it could be life-changing, not only for the people to whom you actively listen but also, for you too. Let's go.