4 Powerful Steps - Listening

"Power listening—the art of probing and challenging the information garnered from others to improve its quality and quantity—is the key to building a knowledge base that generates fresh insights," ~ Bernard T. Ferrari, author of Power Listening: Mastering the Most Critical Business Skill of All (Portfolio Hardcover, 2012).

It's not easy learning to be a better listener. We think faster than we can hear. While we're waiting for someone to finish their sentence, we've already figured out what they're going to say.

So in the meantime, most of us are thinking about other things, like what we're going to say next. But then we miss opportunities to challenge assumptions. And we lose focus.

Bernard T. Ferrari suggests four steps that form a good listening foundation:

1.      Show respect

2.      Keep quiet

3.      Challenge assumptions

4.      Maintain focus

In my previous post 4 Steps to Better Listening,  I mentioned that the ability to really listen is the most overlooked and undervalued skill. We rarely practice doing it better. Here's more about the last two steps, #3: Challenging assumptions and #4: Maintaining focus, both essential to building power listening skills.

3.      Challenge assumptions. Too many high-caliber professionals inadvertently act like know-it-alls, remaining closed to anything that undermines their beliefs. Good listeners seek to understand—and challenge—the assumptions that lie below the surface of every conversation. Holding onto these assumptions is the biggest roadblock to power listening.

It’s admittedly hard to scrutinize preconceived notions and shake up our thinking. We must be willing to reevaluate what we know and welcome what we don’t (or can’t) know. Shift your mind-set to embrace ambiguity and uncover what each conversation partner needs from the interaction.

It’s admittedly hard to scrutinize preconceived notions and shake up our thinking. We must be willing to reevaluate what we know and welcome what we don’t (or can’t) know. Shift your mind-set to embrace ambiguity and uncover what each conversation partner needs from the interaction.

4.  Maintain focus. Power listening requires you to help your conversation partner isolate the problem, issue or decision at hand. Discard extraneous details or emotions that interfere with homing in on what truly matters.

Create a focused, productive conversation by reducing external and internal background noise. Ask questions that highlight key issues and minimize the urge to stray from them.

Recognize that all conversations have intellectual and emotional components. It’s important to “decouple” the two, according to Ferrari, as several emotions are guaranteed to hinder communication:

1.      Impatience

2.      Resentment and envy

3.      Fear and feeling threatened

4.      Fatigue and frustration

5.      Positive emotions and over excitement

As with anger and fear, excitement can also distract you from asking the right questions and challenging underlying assumptions.

“The most exciting part is that, once you get good at listening, you will be able to do it easily, almost effortlessly, without even thinking about it,” Ferrari writes.

Practice his four power-listening steps to become the kind of listener others seek as a conversation partner. You’ll build valuable relationships, become more informed, make better decisions and come up with new innovative ideas.

Another resource that increases your listening skill set is The Good Listener by James Sullivan. Sullivan grounds the skill and the why on the foundation of God and our responsibility to one another to listen as a reflection of worth and dignity bestowed upon every person as God’s creation.

Take a couple minutes each day to stop and reflect on your listening. Listening is a skill set that can change your trajectory. Develop your favorite questions that work for you in different situation like work, home of with friends. Taking regular pause inside and ask yourself if you are really listening. As a coach (www.moleadershipcoaching.com) I work in this area regularly and find leaders make great progress quickly when they decide to work on the skill of listening.

What are you doing to pay attention to this key skill of listening?

I’d love to hear from you I can be reached here marc@moleadershipcoaching.com and on LinkedIn or text me at 714-267-2818

Here is my CALENDAR to make connecting simple

 3.      Challenge assumptions. Too many high-caliber professionals inadvertently act like know-it-alls, remaining closed to anything that undermines their beliefs. Good listeners seek to understand—and challenge—the assumptions that lie below the surface of every conversation. Holding onto these assumptions is the biggest roadblock to power listening.

It’s admittedly hard to scrutinize preconceived notions and shake up our thinking. We must be willing to reevaluate what we know and welcome what we don’t (or can’t) know. Shift your mind-set to embrace ambiguity and uncover what each conversation partner needs from the interaction.

4 Steps to Better Listening

In my previous post, I mentioned that the ability to really listen is the most overlooked and undervalued skill in both business and personal life. We rarely take time to practice doing it better.

In Power Listening: Mastering the Most Critical Business Skill of All (Portfolio Hardcover, 2012), Bernard T. Ferrari suggests four steps that form a good listening foundation:

1.      Show respect

2.      Keep quiet

3.      Challenge assumptions

4.      Maintain focus

This sounds simple and straight forward, for sure. But most of us fail to complete all four steps adequately to achieve "power listening." I see this in the work I do at www.moleadershipcoaching.com with some pretty smart professionals.

Many people show respect, but have a hard time keeping quiet. Yet keeping quiet is key to respecting what a person is saying. While some of my clients are pretty good at challenging assumptions, they also tend to redirect the conversation to their own ideas and point of view, failing to maintain the focus. If we truly want to "hear" what our conversation partners are saying, we'll need to do better.

Here are Ferrari's ideas for the first two steps, and I'll write my next post on the last two steps.

1.      Show respect. Our conversation partners often have the know-how to develop effective solutions. Part of being a good listener is helping them pinpoint critical information and see it in a new light. To harness the power of these ideas, you must fight the urge to “help” by providing immediate solutions. Learn to respect your partner’s ability to identify them.

Being respectful doesn’t mean avoiding tough questions. Good listeners routinely ask key questions to uncover the information needed to make better decisions. The goal of power listening is to ensure the free and open flow of information and ideas.

2.      Keep quiet. Get out of the way of your conversations so you can hear what’s important. Don’t hog the spotlight, try to prove your own smarts or emphasize how much you care. Speak only to underscore your conversation partner’s points. Your partner should speak 80 percent of the time, with you filling the remaining 20 percent. Make your speaking time count by spending most of it asking questions, rather than having your say.

This may be easier said than done, as most of us are naturally inclined to speak our minds. Still, you can’t really listen if you’re too busy talking. We’ve all spent time with lousy listeners who treat conversations as opportunities to broadcast their status or ideas. They spend more time formulating their next response than listening to the conversation. There is no doubt God invites us into stillness in Psalm 46:10 “Be still and know that I am God.” This is a powerful invitation for our relationship with God and others. If we listen to others and ask God to guide our listening He will change what you hear.

What's been your experience as a conversation partner? I'd love to hear about the times when you felt you were really being listened to… as well as your experiences when you felt not heard. As a listener, see what you can do this week in your conversations to extend your "keeping quiet" times.

What are you doing to pay attention show respect and to engage in quietness?

If you have a desire to be heard, ask. Ask a friend to just listen. Hire a coach to listen. Work on being a better listener. We need both. We need to be heard and we need to listen.

I’d love to hear from you I can be reached here marc@moleadershipcoaching.com and on LinkedIn or text me at 714-267-2818

If you would like to be heard I would be honored, here is my CALENDAR to make connecting simple

Power Listening to God and Others

Power Listening: The Secret to Successful Conversations

I only wish I could find an institute that teaches people how to listen. Business people need to listen at least as much as they need to talk. Too many people fail to realize that real communication goes in both directions. ~ Lee Iacocca

Listening may be the most important, yet least developed, skill for personal and professional success, especially in today’s fast-paced business climate.

To be honest, most of us take listening for granted. In fact, our brains love to try to multi-task: we assume we know what the person's going to say, so we let our minds wander, at the same time filtering it for similar experiences we've had, all the while formulating a response.

The problem is that while we are doing all that, we're not listening well, and we often risk subtle clues to important issues. This tendency to multi-task is almost universal. I see it with many of the clients I work with www.moleadershipcoaching.com

Good listening skills can help you:

·       Facilitate the right alliances

·       Foster sales and team alignment

·       Create healthy personal relationships

·       Find out what you don’t know

·       Make the right decisions

·       Develop innovative ideas

So many people I know, instead of actively listening, focus instead on how they are going to articulate their own views most effectively. This approach is misguided.

"Power listening—the art of probing and challenging the information garnered from others to improve its quality and quantity—is the key to building a knowledge base that generates fresh insights," according to author Bernard T. Ferrari in his book, Power Listening: Mastering the Most Critical Business Skill of All (Portfolio Hardcover, 2012).

Unfortunately, business schools fail to teach power listening. Of the nearly 300 communications courses the American Management Association offers, only two deal directly with listening skills. Professionals must nonetheless write and speak more persuasively, so it’s essential to improve one’s listening capabilities.

Listening to someone is a direct way to show you care and value that person. You are giving your time, your attention, your self. This is HUGE and the person talking knows when they are truly listened to well.

As you expand your capacity to listen well, you will find that the same skill can be applied when you listen to God. You learn to quiet your thinking. You seek to hear everything. You learn to hear the voice of the God who made you.

One of the more effective ways to improve your listening skills is to work one-on-one with an executive coach or a spiritual director.  As you can imagine, learning about it in a book won't give you the real-world practice you'll need to develop your power listening skills.

Suggested possible image, from Wikipedia page on Active Listening:

Listening - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_listening

Take a couple minutes each day to stop and listen to God. Try to be intentional about listening with other. Taking regular pause inside and ask yourself if you are really listening. As a coach (www.moleadershipcoaching.com) I work in this area regularly and find leaders make great progress quickly when they decide to work on the skill of listening.

What are you doing to pay attention to this key skill of listening?

I’d love to hear from you I can be reached here marc@moleadershipcoaching.com and on LinkedIn or text me at 714-267-2818

Here is my CALENDAR to make connecting simple