It’s the most valuable asset you can possess but how many of us are doing it wrong?

 

In a society where those who shout the loudest dominate, we must recognize the boldest innovators, leaders, mentors, and friends listen. It’s one of the most empowering acts you can do for another. Its rewards are both enlightening and transformative.

 

Did you know that there is an effective way to listen that absolves you of needing to supply answers? That, in fact, the person who has approached you for assistance is already in possession of the answer they seek.

 

In spite of this fact, it doesn’t stop you from scrabbling for techniques, wishing to be able to offer solutions, or feeling that you’re not doing enough for the speaker.

 

Your concerns are well-founded. So, let’s work out how to do listen effectively and actively. Doing so will:

• Ramp up your communication skills;
• Give you an effective problem-solving technique you can use to make a difference in any area of your life;
• Provide your speaker with exactly what they need;

In this article, we will look at:

1. Why Your Presence is Enough: The Power of Listening
2. Creating the right mindset
3. Active Listening Techniques you can apply

Before I begin, I want to share how the seeds of my commitment to the power of listening were sewn. It started when I volunteered for a listening charity in the UK. The conversations I had with strangers remain with me today, guiding my understanding of the value of listening.

 

Late at night, on a shift in cold, dark East End London, anonymous calls came in. Often the caller was in a state of despair and needed to talk through their situation with an impartial, trained listener. These people could have been anyone: from a high-achiever to a prison inmate. Desperate times do not limit themselves to one person; they arrive indiscriminately.

 

During the course of countless, genuine phone calls, I heard the voices and the outlook of callers change. A negative beginning could result in a positive end. Why so? Because listening facilitates powerful and stark journeys. Often, what occurred within the speaker empowered them; gave them solace; lifted their emotions and helped them to identify their prospects. Therefore, while it may feel like listening is a passive activity, you should know that –

 

Your Presence is Enough

 

Because active listening is a powerful device anyone can master. Its service absolves you of the need to supply advice to the speaker.

 

However, we are human. It’s natural to want to deliver a solution. In active listening, you accept there is no onus to deliver a solution. In fact, you are best to actively not supply advice. Research proves that having a person to talk with, free of pressure and judgment, empowers the speaker to arrive at their own answer.

“The task of leadership is not to put greatnesss into people, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already.” John Buchan.

 

Or, as Nancy Kline puts it in her book, Time To Think,

“Usually the brain that contains the problem also contains the solution – often the best one.”

The listening you do is the help the person needs. So, refrain from giving advice even when it’s asked for.

 

Dubious that you can make it as an active listener? Further on, there are simple techniques for powerful outcomes.

 

For now, as a listener, recognize and remind yourself of these statements:

• The listening you offer demonstrates appreciation and respect.
• Your presence tells a person they matter.
• Your presence says, “You are important.”
• Listening without judgment or pressure enables an individual to identify their best solution.
• You are best to not advise.

Before we continue, why not take a moment to consider:

 

What’s your listening style?

Are you an Active Listener?

Traits:
Listens

Permits silence

Interested

Focuses only on the speaker

Maintains eye contact

Maintains attention

Remains free of judgment

 

 

Or are you more of a Passive Listener?

Traits:

Speaks over or finishes sentences

Talks through silences

Loses attention

Multitasks

Looks away

Their mind wanders

Lacks control so displays personal responses

 

At times, you may exhibit qualities of both types but, in a situation that requires special attention, it’s best to quit those passive listener tendencies.

Here’s why it pays to be involved:

 

A disinterested – or passive – listener indicates that the speaker does not matter. Poor attention signals their needs are not important; that what they have to say holds no value. In turn, the speaker absorbs these unspoken messages and re-affirms their negative beliefs. Their root issue remains buried deep under (psychological) ground.

 

On the upside, as an active listener, you empower your speaker to dig down to the root issue and unearth the key that will unlock their storeroom of solutions.

 

In the next section, we’ll look at how to create the right mindset for active listening.

 

Before I do that, I share a part of the training I did as an active listening volunteer.

 

During the volunteers’ open day, when we were all strangers to one another, the session leader paired us up then tasked us with fulfilling questions on our partner’s behalf. We could not ask them anything before the task. Consequently, we had no knowledge of them to help us answer questions about them.

 

One question was: what car do you think Joanna drives? Without asking her, only by looking at how she presented herself, I wrote down my prediction. Other questions followed: where are they from? What job do they do? Do they have any children? And so on.

 

Once we’d completed that exercise, we then paired up with our partner to find out their answers to the questions. I’d written that I thought Joanna drove a VW Golf. She drove a BMW. And so we went on with our comparisons of speculative answers and facts.

 

Neither of us arrived at a speculative answer that was true for our partner. Joanna predicted that I had children, I don’t. I predicted that she worked in the financial sector, she was a social worker.

 

What had we founded our guesses upon? We based our answers on assumptions based on what we could see.

 

What was the purpose of this exercise?

 

The charity encourages listening without judgment. It teaches that assumptions are limiting since you’re to enter the speaker’s world without prejudice and without the risk of causing your speaker to withhold. Removing assumptions is key to freeing limiting behaviors. I’ll return later to how you can handle assumptions to challenge (with kindness) your speaker’s limiting beliefs.

 

Next up:

 

How to master and create the right mindset for listening
 

The best conditions for thinking, if you really stop to notice, are not tense. They are gentle. They are quiet. They are unrushed. They are stimulating but not competitive. They are encouraging. They are paradoxically both rigorous and nimble.

Nancy Kline, Time to Think

 

When you enter into an interaction, remember:

• Keep neutral (even after the most incendiary of statements)
• Do not set out to change the person
• Consider your attitude
• You want my advice? Don’t give it.
• Batten down the ego response system
• Acceptance is key

Keep neutral (even after the most incendiary of statements)

 

Offer neither encouragement nor discouragement; say neither, “Well done,” nor, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

 

The interaction you share is a matter of creating discourse for the speaker with the speaker. Your views, though they may be words of encouragement, whether positive encouragement or to dissuade can have a harming effect. As hard as it will be, respond with neutral, balanced empathetic statements, summarise or reflect what they have said but do not let your own self and values enter the conversation.

 

Do not set out to change the person

 

Free yourself of intention to change the person with whom you’re speaking, for we are self-determining beings. If you do not, you may be perceived as a threat by the person who’s put their trust in you. If positive change occurs as a result of your interaction, acknowledge the positive privately, but don’t make it your goal.

 

Consider your attitude

 

Enter into a state of acceptance and be willing to maintain active engagement with your speaker. As soon as your commitment waivers, they will sense this and close down. Therefore, commit your time and attention to them. This is what it’s for. Do not clock watch or multi-task. As they have entrusted you, so they deserve your undivided attention and will flourish under its light.

 

You want my advice? Don’t give it.

 

Though the conversation might have started with, “Can I ask you for some advice?” The chances are it’s best for you not to, especially on a deeply personal subject. By being an active listener, you can guide your speaker towards their innate wisdom without sharing advice of your own, which will be wrong.

 

Batten down the ego response system

 

Here’s where battling old habits comes in. In everyday conversation, it’s becomes natural to finish others’ sentences; to predict what they’re going to say or speaking over them. These bad habits hinder effective communication. No one gets to hear what another person wants to say, and no one gets to say exactly what they want.

 

When you’re listening, you might hear an opportunity to throw in a “me too” statement. Hold back. Bite your tongue. You’re being a listener so listen.

 

Acceptance is key

 

The likelihood is that you will encounter statements you disagree with. Your personal differences and world view will come in to challenge you. This conversation is not about you: it is about your speaker. After all:

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Anaïs Nin

Hold this quote in mind when you feel challenged by your speaker’s views or when you want to impart advice. Dialogue is complex by its very nature because it is a collision (or collusion if you’re fortunate) of two people’s views. We discuss in order to discover one another and to reach a level of comprehension; rarely does this mean that we adopt an identical outlook or assume identical history of experiences. For these complex reasons, it is best to follow the guidelines established rather than set out to put your advice upon them.

 

Feeling ready to look at the techniques?

Here’s where you can fill your toolkit with active listening devices.

 

We’ve already established that listening well isn’t an easy skill. However, the techniques to do so, and to facilitate your speaker’s experience, are accessible to anyone who’s open to learning and using them with the right intentions.

 

Once you have established the right listening environment, that is:

“Be neither critical, evaluative, nor moralizing. Enter into your conversation in an atmosphere of equality and freedom, permissiveness and understanding, acceptance and warmth.” Nancy Kline

You have six methods of response available to you. The charity I volunteered for designed these into a response wheel for volunteers to use, though this stands in counterpoint to the advice given by the author Nancy Kline, whom you’ve seen me cite. Nancy Kline recommends that presence and attention alone can give the speaker all they need to arrive at their own breakthroughs.

 

This said; it’s wonderful to head into the unknown with an arsenal of tools to steel your confidence. By their design, these methods are established within a wheel arrangement to give no hierarchy or preference to one over another. You’ll find, as you go on, that some are easier to apply than others; that some fall best later in a conversation than at its beginning. This you discover in practice.

 

Let me know reassure you of their effectiveness in safeguarding you – while you must remain attentive, your attention wholly engaged upon the speaker – never once need you grasp outside of the task of listening and responding according to the methods. Dispatch no aspect of your mind away to search for advice; instead, center upon the techniques and your interaction.

 

Acknowledgment with encouragement

 

Focused upon your speaker, you become acutely aware that any gesture, physical or verbal, assumes a volume and significance louder than ever. However, you must offer your speaker words of encouragement to persuade them to continue speaking and, therefore, thinking as well as engaging with their feelings.

 

Simple murmurs of acknowledgment, such as, “Mmmm,” or, “I see,” and, “Go on,” signal that you’re paying attention and encourages your speaker. This is especially relevant should your conversation be over the telephone.

 

Tip: Keep it neutral, simple and encouraging without hyperbole.

 

Reacting

 

Save yourself from soap opera melodrama and react in tempo with the conversation. If your speaker discloses sensitive or revealing information, acknowledge it with statements such as, “That must have been hard,” or, “It sounds like you’ve had a difficult time.”

 

Tip: Moderate your reactions enough to show your understanding and engagement but not so much that it endorses or inflames.

 

Clarification

 

This is when active listening steps into ‘action.’ Clarification requests are questions like, “Do you mean…?” or “If I’m following right, you’re saying…”

 

The effect of clarification is not only for your benefit; it requests that the speaker re-visit what they’ve said which can shift their mind from an emotive state to a critical perspective, as they survey difficult terrain again.

 

My advice is to clarify with some caution during particularly heated moments. Sometimes your speaker needs to off-load and clarification at the right time can exacerbate a well-intentioned question.

 

Tip: Time your asking of this question because you don’t want to offend your speaker or throw them off their line of thought.

 

Reflecting

 

This resembles a conversational nudge and reinforces your engagement with your speaker. Pick up on a small chunk of language that they’ve said then return it.

 

“It’s all been too much lately, one thing after the other.”

 

“It’s been too much?”

 

The chances are that your speaker won’t consciously notice you borrowed their words so don’t worry about sounding like a parrot or that you might appear to be using a short-hand conversational technique.

 

Tip: Pacing is everything. Do not feel that you must reflect, clarify or offer encouragement every time. Learn the speaker’s tempo and resist nervous impulse to talk immediately into their natural breaks or pauses.

 

Summarise

 

Once your speaker has explained a series of information, it can be useful to paraphrase it, especially once the conversation has been flowing a while and it sounds that the speaker is losing sight of their task.

 

“It sounds like you have a lot of responsibilities. You mentioned you have… as well as… and then…, too.”

 

Why’s it effective?

 

When I applied summarizing in conversations, the speaker acknowledges information about them coming from an outside source. It can act as rather a jolt, shifting their perspective. Though never your purpose to alter their viewpoint, as neutral a function as summarizing is, it carries with it its own effects.

 

Tip: When you have been talking for a while, summarizing can help keep the speaker on track. At the end of the summary, it can be useful to ask, “How does hearing all of this make you feel?”

 

Open questions

 

Your role is to let the conversation evolve, not to hinder it with closed questions. Encourage your speaker to be lucid upon the matter with open questions, “How did this make you feel…?” “Where…” “Can you tell me a bit more about…?”

 

Upon the matter of questions, let’s take a moment to address two sub-topics within this area:

• Stay away from “Why?”
• Go for feelings

Why appeals to the analytical part of your brain. If the speaker has a need to investigate their feelings towards a subject or to express difficult emotions, why can act as a stopper. It hinders the flow.

 

Go for feelings when pent up emotions need expressing. Your speaker might be having a difficult time at home or be experiencing a stressful period at work. While they might come to you to discuss an incident, asking, “How did that make you feel?” will open up the well-spring. It can produce the catharsis they need.

 

To summarise:

These 6 response techniques are all you need to aid your path to becoming an active listener

1. Acknowledge & encourage
2. React
3. Clarify
4. Reflect
5. Summarise
6. Open questions

Tip: Safeguard yourself. Some conversations are particularly hard to witness. Ensure that you have a system in place that will protect you so that you are able to leave the difficult conversation behind, complete, satisfied that you did the very best job you could do.

 

In search of a remedy

By this point, you’re equipped with all you need to be an effective active listener, though, no doubt, you have some reservations about fulfilling the task. I also consider that you may wish to have some form of remedy to hand.
 

Come the end of your conversation, there is a very high likelihood that your speaker will have resolved their issue. You are absolved of the responsibility of offering advice. If this is not the case, there are methods that can be applied – forms of questions that you phrase to remove a limiting belief; guiding your colleague’s use of language from a can’t do standpoint to a can do position, and more – but require careful handling and are best done by those familiar with the practice as well as skilled in facilitating deeper work. You will already, quite likely, have encountered enough during your active listening engagement to understand that some matters are best aided by someone with thorough training.

 

Before concluding, there is one final obstacle you’ll come across in your role as active listener. It is a monster.

 

Silence

 

In documentary film-making, film-makers leave a camera or tape-recorder running after the official interview has ended and the director has said cut.

 

Why do they do this?

 

Those moments can be the most revealing as the subject relaxes from their public facing persona and returns to who they are. A prisoner who’s being interviewed with his hands beneath the table for the duration of the interview afterwards lifts his manacled hands onto the table. The audience gains a fuller picture.

 

Silence works in this way, too. It produces extraordinary and powerful insights for the speaker. It is during this time of potent reflection that they do their best thinking. You can tell when the thinking has stopped and needs encouragement; often, though, you’ll not have to offer any prompt or word.

 

Therefore, in spite of every instinct urging you to speak into the silence, refrain, unless you are absolutely certain the speaker has ceased thinking and is closing down. In that case, draw upon your toolkit of techniques.

When all is said and done
When a situation occurs and you feel the need to speak in order to resolve, defer, instead, to listening and draw upon the mental attitude and approaches laid out in this article.
 

Rarely is anything foolproof, especially when it concerns two human beings, but the methods when you trust them and apply them work.

 

Active listening takes a concerted effort and it takes resilience as well as strength to guide an individual, especially if the resolution involves further difficult actions requiring professional intervention. However, do not shy away from it when you feel capable and know that these techniques will guide you, truly and effectively, through many situations that you’ll encounter at work and at home. Truly, in the end, it is those who listen who get ahead and enable others.

 

Remember:

 

Switch off judgment and voice-over narration;

 

You don’t have to like the person to listen well, but you owe it to them to create a non-biased comfortable environment in which they can express themselves;

 

Protect yourself and ensure you have a coping system in place if the conversation you have is particularly demanding or difficult;

 

Be assured that you are not responsible for the outcome and your speaker is a self-determining and capable individual;

 

Do not set out to alter the person’s viewpoint but to facilitate their thought-process.

 

Refrain from putting forward your own opinion.

 

Lean into your speaker, acknowledge and respect their presence; do not critique what they have to say.

 

When you are struggling, know that they are struggling too.

 

Finally, when faced with silence, do not succumb to its power: this is when the hard work is being done. Let silence be. It produces the greatest results.

 

Acknowledgment:

 

This work draws upon methodology cited by Carl R Rogers and Richard E Farston; Samaritans charity, and Nancy Kline’s ‘Time to Think.’