Activate Your Superpowers: Listening
Posted on June 02, 2021 by JM Pique, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.
Here you have a few tips to be a better listener. Everybody will thank you, starting with yourself.
Hey, listen. Do you know you might have a superpower? Oh, which one? Yeah, right, just listen, that’s all.
Frankly, I never thought we could have superpowers. Still, Ajit Dodani showed us during a recent session he hosted in Clubhouse that we need to believe a bit more in ourselves and our capacity to activate parts of us that are usually “sleeping.”
So how do you get to be a better listener or communicator? Here are some ideas we got out of a conversation where many talented participants contributed.
You may seem quiet and relaxed when you’re listening, but “not talking” doesn’t mean you’re doing nothing. It would help if you were purposely active. For me, listening is doing your absolute best to understand everything and everyone around you deeply. Sometimes, instead of listening, I prefer to use ‘reading’ people and situations. And words are usually only the surface.
You need to make sure and make clear that you’re putting all your attention. People know when you’re focused on what they’re saying, trying to understand and add value to the conversation truly. Do you feel that? Everybody does.
Words are only a small part of communication. Pay attention to tone, underlying emotions, non-verbal communication, pauses. Peter Drucker said that “the most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.” That is so true. We know it’s challenging to simultaneously pay attention to all these things, decipher all the messages, analyze them, make up your conclusions, and be ready to give a meaningful and constructive response. Yeah, listening is tough, isn’t it?
Try to practice listening like meditation: focus on the outside, and let your thoughts pass by, try to leave them aside, not to interfere with your ability to grasp all the details. There’s nothing worse than being in front of someone who seems to be waiting for you to finish talking to start putting their ideas through.
Did you feel that sometime? We all did, and it’s discouraging.
Show them you’re focused on the conversation and not self-oriented. Ask open-ended questions; mean the questions you make, show genuine interest. “How can I help you?”
Listening, understanding, and responding is a matter of purpose, will, habits, but it’s also intuition. Don’t try to know why you think what you think, why you built that conclusion. Many things are going on in your head, and you’re not in control of most of them. It’s humbling, but Daniel Kahneman showed the science of that with books like Thinking, Fast and Slow.
How do you get yourself into an active and deep “listening” mode? Don’t try to force you; that’d probably be worse. Instead, try to find something interesting in what you’re listening to. If you’re interested in anything, your attention will boost.
And at the same time, try not to hurry things up. When you’re anxious, you’re nervous, and you’re focused on the thing you have to do next, your attention tends to zero. You basically disconnect yourself from the conversation, and those who are in front of you know, which means they also lose interest in you or telling you anything.
These are only some of the brilliant ideas that appeared during the Clubhouse session, but I’m sure many of you have your own ones, and maybe even you want to share them? Let’s do it.
