#Listen

Listening is a lost art. Doctors don't do it. Husbands don't do it. Politicians don't do it. Most of us don't do it. Active listening means hitting pause on your Type A dashboard and making sure you understand not just what others are saying but what they mean. Here are some tips on how to do it better.

Sir William Osler wasn’t exactly wrong when he said, “Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.” But he didn’t mean it literally. His patients did not offer up esoteric and complete medical diagnoses on a silver platter. They left him clues in plain language that he listened to carefully in order to make the correct diagnosis.

Active listening requires mastering many skills, including reading body language and tone of voice, maintaining your attention, and being aware of and controlling your emotional response. In this article, the author explains what active listening is and how to improve this essential communication skill.

Learning to listen well begins with understanding what type of listener you are. In our work as educators, health care clinicians in critical care, and debriefing experts who teach how to optimize learning conversations, these researchers observed four distinct?listening styles:

• Analytical listeners?analyze a problem from a neutral starting point.?Example: You listen to two ExecEd students debate the relevance of a recent article to their industry, taking care to explore both students’ viewpoints before responding.
• Relational listeners?build connection and understand the emotions underlying a message.?Example:?You notice a student’s voice quivers when they talk about an upcoming paper that’s due, so you consider whether they’re stressed and why.
• Critical listeners?judge both the content of the conversation and the reliability of the speaker themselves.?Example:?A student challenges you about a grade, so you listen to their reasoning to determine whether this is just about their GPA or whether it’s worth changing your viewpoint.
• Task-focused listeners?shape a conversation toward the efficient transfer of important information.?Example:?A student asking for a deadline extension attempts to offer a lengthy justification for the request, but you interrupt early to find out how long of an extension they’re seeking.

?Here are some tricks to becoming a better listener:

• Pay attention and avoid distraction?
• Know when to keep quiet
• When possible, listen on your phone, as it can often be easier to focus and listen when you can't see someone
• Analysis is key to determining the "facts, emotions and indications of the interlocutor’s values."

?We may have learned that we need to let people speak without interrupting but taking turns talking does not truly denote listening. And unintentionally hijacking conversations to advise, inject humor, empathize, prioritize efficiency, or insert ourselves into the speaker’s narrative is often done with good intentions, but may instead disrupt the human connection we think we’re forging. Recognizing when to shift out of our habitual styles and consciously apply alternative styles of listening and responding may allow for more effective and meaningful interactions.

According to the?National Academy of Medicine (NAM), “High-need individuals?are disproportionately older, female, white, and less educated. They are also more likely to be publicly insured, have fair-to-poor self-reported health, and be susceptible to lack of coordination within the health care system.” Overall, these patients make up just 5% of the patient population but account for nearly half the spending on health care in the United States. Over the past several years the Mount Sinai Health System, has focused on developing a new generation of clinical services for high-need patients by drawing heavily on strategies pioneered by others across the nation, guided by the recommendations in the newly released NAM report, “Effective Care for High-Need Patients“?

Physician SEAL teams to target these high-need patients are more common.

These days, more and more agencies and businesses are taking listening to a new level. The trend mavens in media, advertising and communications are typically at the leading edge of creating and spotting trends. But, things are getting harder due to privacy concerns about sharing data and information on the web and social

According to Linkedin, as remote work gives rise to an increase in the monitoring of employees, most tech workers say they'd rather quit than accept certain forms of surveillance through their computers. A Morning Consult survey showed more than half would leave an employer who recorded audio or video of them — or who used facial recognition to monitor productivity. The poll also showed slightly fewer than half would resign over having keystrokes tracked, or if screenshots were taken of their computer screens.

Social media has taken every business by storm. Healthcare is no different, and, being relatively new, marketers are trying to figure out the best way to use it. There are many ways it has impacted healthcare,?suggestions about why some win and some lose, and lots and lots and lots of advice on how to use it effectively.

Unfortunately, most companies and their ad agencies use social media to talk. Worst case, they use it to shout. Instead, they should be using it to .

I recently attended a talk by a social media expert who offered the following tidbits:

1. Listen, don't talk for understanding?the maximum impact of social media. Some companies are much better at this than others. Stop. Did you hear what I just said? Are you practicing active listening.?

2. Social media is much more than what's on Facebook. It is, in fact, any user-generated content. It could be a bulletin board, a replica of a fax posted somewhere or a listserve that started before Mark Zuckerberg was born.

3. What you find depends on where you look.?

4. The process involves identifying representative and meaningful channels, mining unstructured data on the sites and deriving insights that drive responses. Sometimes the response is a law suit.

5. The idea is to find out what people are saying, get a sense for industry trends and pinpoint influencers, be they connectors, mavens, salespeople or locksmiths (people who know how to open doors others can't)

6. Geography is fate. Like politics, social media tends to be local. What they are saying or trending in one place might not apply to another.

7. Don't promise a product that you can't deliver. One example was a campaign to promote self wellness. Guess who didn't get the memo? The docs. You can guess how that worked.

8. One size does not fit all, and like all products, some segments use different social media for different reasons because they value different things.

9. Beware of C-suite executives who discover Twitter over the weekend at their beach house.

10. hell is littered with good intentions.

11. Listening using analytics to data-mine unstructured data is a way to validate your value proposition or business model canvas and you don't have to get out of the office to do it.

12. Forget the old “spray and pray.”?A popular old marketing concept was that if you did enough broadcasting of your message to enough people, you would find success. Today you need to talk with, not at, your customers and constituents to get ideas. The best thought leaders have learned how to listen and acknowledge their community.

The point of customer discovery when you are trying to validate underlying assumptions in your business model canvas is to listen. Don't talk. Don't sell.

Doctors, hospitals and everyone else who touches patients are trying to understand social media and its impact. Boomers, Gen X'ers and Millenials seem to have some use patterns that are different?and, at the same time, some commonalities. In case you haven't noticed, women are different. Making sense of all this has created new industries and opportunities. But, like all technologies in medicine, it is a tool. Some are asking whether the stethoscope should be killed.

The goal is not to create noise-induced hearing loss. The goal is to deliver value.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack