Squiggly Shortcut: Listen Like You Mean It (5 Ways to Improve)

0:00What happened to her? Dead. On April 17th, the year's scariest movie arrives. Let the mummification ritual begin. Audiences are calling Lee Cronin's The Mummy. Glorious edge-of-your-seat horror. Terrifying from beginning to end. I really miss being a part of the family. And an insanely scary ride.

0:24Lee Cronin's The Mummy. Only in theaters April 17th. Rated R. Under 17. Not admitted without parent. 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.

1:06So 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 um who perhaps starts to speak but then gets spoken over um 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 for challenge and you don't hear any disagreement maybe that's a prompt to ask a different kind of question.

1:50So 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 you're 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?

2:45Maybe 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 that there's this opportunity.

3:23Let's make sure we don't miss that. What do we need to make happen so we don't miss that opportunity? Because you sound really energized by that word 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 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.

3:57and 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 kind of 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.

4:38Let'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.

5:15And 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.

5:53Repeating 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? Zero 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.

6:32I really like her. 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 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. I'm Helen and Sarah at squigglycareers.com. Thanks for watching.