The simplest rule to improve your listening skills
What I practice to become a better problem-solver & facilitator
I used to be a really bad listener. Someone told me a story and I remembered a similar thing that happened to me or something I knew about the topic. I instantly blurted out anything that came to my mind. What happened was that I pulled the attention away from the other person towards me. Pretty self centered.
If you want to have interesting conversations, learn something or be inspired, there is one really simple rule:
Be interested, not interesting.
It means to ask deepening open questions leaving the attention with the other person instead of adding your own experience.
Benefits of better listening
Become a much better problem-solver and innovator because you are asking more questions to get a deeper understanding of the problem. That is often the key to the solution.
Become a more respected and effective leader - for colleagues and your kids. You will spot misunderstandings faster.
Have greater chances of getting inspired by others which can help you grow personally or acquire more knowledge.
Have a chance to meet people on a deeper level and connect with them feeding your own need for belonging & connection.
Three things I practice to listen better
Obvious but sometimes hard to do: I try not to do anything else besides paying attention to the other person.
Ask open instead of leading questions: When I ask “Wasn´t that scary?” I ask a yes/no question which kills the flow of a conversation and I add my opinion. When I ask “How was it?” I leave the full attention with the other person. I make the other person think more which will deepen the conversation.
Keep silence: Give the other person time to think some more before I ask another question. Being comfortable with silence really depends on the other person. I find it easy with some people and hard with others.
I read about the principle of Be interested, not interesting in the book “Just Listen” by Mark Goulston. In fact, I listend to the audio book about 5 times. A few years later, I also bought the book. There is no other book that I listened to so many times.
If you want to read only one book about listening, I recommend that one. The content had a great impact on me. The topic sounds trivial at first but the better I get the more I realize how powerful this hidden skill is.
🍏 What is your listening trick?
🍏 Do you want to read more about listening?
Very important skill!
One exercise I learnt in a recent training to improve listening skills: you give a group one question to answer in pairs and tell them then to switch with another pair and share what they heard from the first pair, then switch again partners and share what the other person shared and at the end ask them to share in big group what they remember . Its requiring active listening otherwise you dont know what to share next:)