Are You Listening?

I can't stress enough how important it is to be a great listener. Listening is the key skill for sales people, managers, negotiators, coaches, teachers and parents.

Everyone really.

I genuinely don't think you can be successful at anything without being a great listener.

Listening Vs Thinking

Luckily, listening is fairly easy once you set your mind to being good at it. I think most people never really consider it as a skill, so never think of it as an issue.

The only thing that makes it a little tricky is that we tend to think faster than other people talk.

We can get a bit bored while they're speaking, especially if we've already predicted what they're going to say.

So we start having thoughts in between their words and before long we're thinking instead of listening.

The game is to control your urge to think about answers and fully concentrate when you're listening.

Of course, you'll be asking questions every now and then, and adding a little bit of content to the conversation but it should be 90% of the time spent listening.

When you're on the listening part, it's got to be full listening, not partial listening.

Benefits Of Listening

There are three huge benefits of being a great listener.

Reason Number One
The first one is being liked. Other people love to talk about themselves. It makes them feel valued if you're asking them about themselves and then genuinely listening to them. And they will like you for it.

Conversely, if you talk about yourself too much, you may come across as only being interested in yourself.

Reason Number Two
The second huge benefit to listening is that you learn from it. Who knows what you will find out. Everyone is interesting if you ask the right questions.

When you're talking about yourself, you're not learning anything. You already know whatever it is you're talking about. If they're doing the talking, then:

• The sales person is learning about interests and needs.
• The parent is understanding their child's thought processes.
• The manager is finding out about problems and maybe new ideas.

Listening is the best way to learn, probably the only way to learn about what's in people's heads which is such an important area to understand.

Reason Number Three
The third benefit of being a great listener is that perhaps counterintuitively, you are in control. When you ask a question and then listen to the answer, you control the conversation. You could steer it anyway that you want with questions like:

• "And then what happened?"
• "So how did you feel about that?"
• "And what other areas are you worried about?"

Moving It On

Did you notice how that third question was different? The first two were exploring deeper into something while the third one was saying "Okay, I've had enough of exploring that area, let's start a new one."

You could even be a bit more extreme with something like, "Okay, so your work is going quite well by the sound of it. How's your life outside work going?"

By making a quick comment and then adding a new question, you're totally in control of where we go next.

You're learning and you're being liked, all at the same time. So your challenge is to try being an amazing listener.

This evening when you're chatting on the sofa with your household, on the phone with family or on Zoom with your friends, try to not say the word I.

Try to find out as much about them as you can.

If they do ask you about yourself, just turn it back around with "Oh yeah, it's crazy right now/work's all fine/not too bad considering. What about yours? How's it going?"

Try being a great listener and you'll find it's easy and very rewarding too.