Are you REALLY listening?

Our desire to react, reduces our ability to add value and create.

My wife consistently tells me that I don’t listen. I recently had a hearing test which confirmed this fact. When I sat in the chair for the test, I mentioned to the Doctor that my wife recons I have bad hearing. She laughed and said that 99% of men that sit in that chair say the same thing.

Turns out my hearing is fine. I recon yours is too. We are most of us just bad at listening. And that is where we can get confused: because listening and hearing are very different.

The stats on listening are shocking. We really are bad at it. Which makes sense given that only 2% of the population are taught how to listen.

Our recall is shocking too. We only remember 50% of a discussion immediately after it took place. That drops to 20% within 24 hours. I mentioned these stats in a keynote to leaders last week and they seemed very surprised, so I thought I would share them with you.

Why so hard?

Partly to blame for our lack of recall is the fact that we are not really listening.

Usually in our conversations we are waiting to respond. Waiting for the other person to finish so that we can jump in with our version, our answer. We make it about us, rather than them.

It’s mainly because we hear faster than we can speak. So we react rather than consider and digest what is being said or inferred. And this causes problems and conflicts rather than alignment and value. We end up on different pages, rather than united. And if we don’t listen then we lose trust and can fail.

Layers

To significantly improve our listening we need to change the way we think about listening itself.

It’s not transactional, it's ongoing.

It is not flat, its layered.

Going beyond active listening means we recognise that the current conversation is important (leaning in), but that proactively planning the ongoing dialogue we have will bring even greater impact.

Try this framework and see how it improves the quality of your questions, dialogue and relationships.

CONTENT: what words and expressions are you hearing (said, unsaid)
INTENT: seek to understand the other persons needs
CONTEXT: bring meaning and value from a wider perspective, your ongoing dialogue.

Richer

When I started using this framework I recognised almost immediately how much deeper my connection to conversations become. I was able to bring more meaning and add more value to discussions and remembered more about the styles and needs of my peers and team.