When we really listen to what another person has to say we are demonstrating respect. But effective listening takes effort. The world around us is filled with distraction which constantly seeks to draw us away from what someone else is saying. When we give in to the distraction we lose the opportunity to respectfully engage. We lose rapport and may have to work to reestablish it.
In addition, we also a experience a kind of cognitive processing gap. As listeners we can comprehend an average of 600 words per minute. Speech, however, flows at approximately 100 to 150 words per minute. How do we fill that gap? We find other things to keep us busy. We may start focusing on goals for the interaction as opposed to listening to the other person. We may listen partially while we wait for our opportunity to speak and plan out what we want to say. As a result we are never really fully attending to what the person is saying.
Listening that effectively that engages the other person respectfully has two characteristics: it is empathetic and it is active.
Listening Empathetically
Empathetic listening is other-centered. We are attempting to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes, intellectually and emotionally. It involves letting go our our own assumptions and biases. Our goal is to learn as much we can about the other person’s perspective by actively attending to all the conveyed by the words and by their activities. Taking the time to truly understand the other person’s perspective “from the inside out” has a tremendous impact in terms of creating and sustaining high-quality within and across an organization. Many of the tools you learned in the NLP lessons can be very helpful in developing effective listening.
There are two actions that you can take if you wish to become a more empathetic listener:
- Empathetic listeners acknowledge the feelings conveyed explicitly or implicitly in the communication by the other person
- Empathetic listeners try to more fully understand the context of the person who is speaking, the particular and concrete details of the person’s situation.
Active Listening
In preparing this section I ran across a wonderful blog post on “Active Listening: The Art of Empathetic Conversation.” It’s a quick read and I think is a very clear and succinct overview of active listening. Check it out. I have also included below a wonderful TED Talk by Scott Pierce on “How to Actively Listen to Others” that I found very moving.
Questions for Discussion
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