Sharpen Your Listening Skills

by Byron Woodson II

One of the things I try to help people with is developing their communication skills. I like doing this because communication is universal, and not everyone wants to know about industrial engineering, not that I know anything about that. So this post will be about sharpening some aspects of your communication: listening.

When you listen to someone, usually what happens is 1) they say something, 2) you make some kind of an internal image about what they say (internal representation), then you 3a) talk to yourself, 3b) feel something about or 3c) make up your own internal image about whatever internal representation you made. . . 4)Then you talk.

The art of listening attempts to short-circuit this listen-think-comment-talk cycle. Accurate listening skills replaces the 'listen-think-comment-talk' cycle with a verification system. That may include saying somthing to the effect of "let me get this right, you said . . . you mean". This verification system makes sure that your internal representation matches exactly what the other person is talking about. Let's delve into an example or two.

I'm from Philadelphia, let's say you're from a small rural town. When we talk about "local politics", you have a very different experience than I do, perhaps having known your mayor or firechief, while my notion of politics is less 'close' having to elect multiple city officials. When we talk about 'politics', much of the usefulness of our discussion relies on how well we can understand each other's version of 'politics'. To understand this, we have to clarify what eachother means by 'politics' by asking lots of questions and giving accurate responses.

The easiest method to sharpen your listening skills I've found is to make a distinction in your own mind between A) the stuff that they tell you and B) the stuff you have to make up to understand the stuff someone tells you. If you say "I'm going to the store to get some milk", I probably would expect you to walk or drive to the grocery store. If I expect this and say "could you pick up some spaghetti", and you know the convenient store doesn't sell spaghetti and reply "they don't sell that" and I think you're being smart . . . you see where this is going.

Initially, if I stuck to the distinction between A) what you told me and B) what I made up, I would have realized that I assumed what kind of store, or what particular store, you were going to and asked which store you were going to.

We replace the 'listen-think-talk' cycle with 'listen-check-ask' cycle. This helps us prevent mis-communication.

This is pretty much what your parents may have done (and boy/girlfriend or wife/husband does) when they ask you where you're going. You could interpret it as them 'prying into your life' or you could understand that it is natural for them to simply want to have an accurate picture of what you're doing. It's a subtle but important distinction.

The flip side of this 'listen-check-ask' cycle is to make sure that when you talk to someone, that you clarify things so that they don't have any questions to clarify what you were talking about, and that they don't have to make things up to understand what you're about to do.

In becoming a better communicator, the onus is on you to listen more effectively and to give more information when you speak. Don't micro-manage what other people do, do micro-clarify what other people think.