All-Embracing Listening

“The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood.

The best way to understand people is to listen to them.”

-Ralph G. Nichols

Effective listening enables us to enhance the quality of our interactions, our relationships, and hence quality of our life. It allow us to build respect and trust, elicit openness and creating a collaborative environment in which people express themselves freely.

Listening is the most important but the most underrated communication skill.  What stops us from being an effective listener? Does mindful listening come naturally to us? If not, why?

As, we are already, always listening to the little voice inside our head and this inner voice operates much faster than we speak, it's not easy to master this skill!

Listening is a dynamic and compassionate process that calls for more than hearing what is said. You need to show that you care about your recipients, their thoughts and feelings, and are willing to hear them out.

They say, “Practice makes you perfect.” I believe perfect practice makes you perfect. Let’s understand the science behind this key skill so that we are able to train ourselves to be better listeners.

Essential Ingredients of All-Embracing Listening

1.      “Listening From”

This represents the context in which you are listening and how you are viewing the speaker and the situation.

There is a “background of relatedness” in every relationship. How do you relate to the person, the situation and the environment determines how you listen. One can listen from a space of respect or appreciation and admiration or lack of these. Imagine a couple on their first date – how do they listen? They give undivided attention to each other, and are committed to listen deeply to each other.

When you care for what the other person is saying, you are naturally more attentive. Eg.– how you listen to your boss or your client may be different from how do you listen to your spouse or children. So the other important point is the willingness to listen effectively.

Tony Robbins emphasizes on the reasons to engage in any behavior or learn any skill. “If there is a big enough why, we figure out how?”  When we have enough reasons to listen, we are able to keep our brain focused and body alert, and put our best efforts to listen.

2. Listening With

Listening with your heart, getting to the heart of the matter, understanding someone’s world through understanding his/her feelings, all this fit into the world of empathetic listening ie.  listening with your heart.

Listening with empathy means nothing but understanding the emotions behind the words, seeking to understand the other person’s world before being understood. By showing sensitivity towards the emotions being expressed, the tension may be reduced and a safer space gets created.

“Listening without” means listening without judgement and filters, prejudices, biases, preconceived views and beliefs, emotional baggage and so on. And you can refrain yourself from giving advice, sharing solutions, ideas or your viewpoint. In this way, you allow the speaker to fully express himself not bogged down by the fear of rejection or criticism. 

3.  Listening for  

It means we intend to listen for what is important for the other person, his value system, what inspires him or motivates him. Listen for what defines him - what has made him the person, he has become. What he is committed to, what does he stand for, in his life? What brings meaning to his life – what is his vision and mission?

Also, you can listen for what confines him, what are the self-imposed constraints and limitations, he has put for himself; what he tends to avoid and prevent.

Let’s take this example, there are some important values that the speaker has conveyed.

“I want to talk to you about doing some design work for us. We’ve worked with one company for a long time now, but they seem to be getting behind the times with their ideas. We’ve got less time to spend on this than we had in the past, so we want a company who is going to take the initiative to find out what they need to give us what we want. We don’t have a lot of time and I’d appreciate you telling me whether you genuinely can work in this way with us.”

The core values depicted here, are Timely delivery, Being Proactive/Taking Initiatives, Innovation/New ideas/creativity, Fulfill their requirements/satisfy their needs and wants, Genuineness/Integrity

By listening for their values, you are able to establish deeper rapport with anyone.

4.  Listening To

This is the simplest of all, listening to what the other person is saying, and how he is saying, to focus on the content of the speaker, and also on what is not being said. It includes observing the non-verbal messages - eye contact, posture, nodding, tone of the voice, and other forms of body language.

Peter Drucker said, “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”

Listening to the facts and the figures and at the same time understanding the message behind the message is accomplished only with active listening.

Conclusion: Listening strengthens the interpersonal effectiveness of individuals in many aspects of their professional and personal lives. Listening is a learnable skill that requires time, energy, and practice to master!

“It takes nothing to hear. It calls for everything to listen!”