Hi, my name’s Sarah, and in this squiggly shortcut, I’m going to be talking about how to listen like you mean it.
And let’s start with a stat. So 90% of us think that we are good listeners, but we retain about 20% of what we listened to. So there is a listening gap that most of us have. It’s actually quite rare for us to overestimate our capabilities. Usually we’re our own worst critics. But when it comes to listening, I think we all like to think we are better than we are.
So it’s probably a skill that most of us could get a bit better at. So I’m going to talk to you about some ways to do that that I’m working on too, at the same time, hopefully as all of you.
So the first one is, when you are listening, notice what is not being said. So when we’re listening, it’s not just about the words. It’s also sort of looking and noticing, like, who isn’t contributing, who is maybe getting cut off, who perhaps starts to speak but then gets spoken over, or just what do you not hear? So do you not hear any challenge in a conversation? If you’re really listening? If you’re listening out of a challenge and you don’t hear any disagreement, maybe that’s a prompt to ask a different kind of question. So notice what’s not being said. So sort of listen to things that are almost invisible. Maybe more about sort of body language or just the words that are not being said or the questions that are not being asked.
Second, remember the power of the pause. So I think this is probably the thing that gets in the way of listening the most is the pressure to respond. You know, we’re all thinking about what we’re going to say next or the question that we want to ask, or we’re trying to get in our point of view, you know, trying to find space to speak. And I think if we can take away the pressure to respond straight away and know that it is okay to pause, then you can really focus on listening to what someone is saying. If your aim is to be present and like, really, like, my aim is to remember 90% of this conversation you are really going to listen. Rather than kind of letting your head wander off to, then what are you going to go and say? Maybe set yourself a goal of, like, how much of this conversation do I want to remember? Because I think that intention will then just naturally improve your listening.
Next, listen for words that are repeated. I often find this really useful if someone has said frustrated three or four times, I will often say that back to someone. I’ve heard you say frustrated three or four times. So this is obviously feeling hard. How long has it been frustrating? Or what do you think is prompting that frustration? And it might be a good thing. It doesn’t have to be something negative. So I’ve heard you say this opportunity, let’s make sure we don’t miss that. Like, what do we need to make happen so we don’t miss that opportunity? Because, you know, you sound really energised by, you know that word and I’ve. And I’ve heard it from you a lot. So listen specifically for the words that people are saying. Again, one of the mistakes I think sometimes that we make is we assume we know what people are going to say or we think we already know the answer, so then we aren’t listening out for the words, the phrases. We’re not, we’re not kind of listening carefully to exactly what people are telling us. I’m definitely guilty of that. Sometimes I’m like, oh, I know what’s coming. And then you sort of slightly switch off.
Next idea. Try and have a no interruption meeting. So this is some borrowed brilliance from Nancy Klein, who does some amazing work on listening and time to think. And if you beforehand say to yourself, right, my job to do in this meeting is not to interrupt, you will just listen better because you won’t be thinking about what you’re going to say, you’ll just be giving other people the space to speak. And maybe you could even agree to do it as a team. Depending on what kind of team you’re in, you might have a week where you experiment with the idea of, we’re going to have this week, no interruption meetings. Let’s just see how we get on with that. And maybe you ask each other for feedback, like, how did that feel having a no interruption meeting? How did that feel? Did it feel very different to how our meeting felt last week? Does everybody feel like they get more space to contribute? Also? Sometimes I think if you can set up meetings in a way where everybody knows they’re going to get the opportunity to contribute, it takes away this idea of I’ve got to interrupt, otherwise I’m not going to get my chance. So that’s, you know, thinking about designing inclusive meetings. An inclusive meeting is where everybody can share a point of view and then hopefully everybody would listen much better too.
And final thought, and this is something I do particularly if I’m doing any coaching conversations is think. My job to do is to summarise at the end of this conversation and I can only do a good summary if I have listened really well. So knowing that I’m going to do that, I think just helps me to listen better. But when I summarise, I will always finish by asking the question, what have I missed? Because you have to be a bit careful in summaries that you’ve not just applied your own interpretation. So you always want to give the other person the sort of opportunity to then say, oh, actually, you didn’t mention this and I feel like that’s important. Repeating is different to summarising. Repeating is. I have heard you say the word frustrated. Summarising is. So if I was going to summarise the priorities, this is what I’m thinking. What are your reflections? What have I missed?
So maybe the first thing you could do now is think about how good do you think your listening skills are? 0 to 10, probably. Then nudge that score down by one, given we all overestimate our listening skills. And then think about what action could you take to nudge up those listening skills by one or two points on that scale? If you want to dive in to learning about listening a bit more, I’d really recommend Kate Murphy’s book. I really like her book. I really like her work. And Helen interviewed her on episode 319 of the Squiggly Careers podcast. So you could go back and have a listen to that. Even more listening for you.
So I hope you found that helpful. If you have any shortcuts that you need from us that you’ve not spotted, you can always email us at helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com.