The mind can be convinced, but the heart must be won…

The average employed adult spends at least eight hours at work five days a week. As a result, for many, work represents more than just a place where we go to earn money. The workplace is in fact an important source of social support and it’s not uncommon to form close and sometimes even life-long friendships there. It makes sense, therefore, that creating a workplace where there is an emotional connection between employees and their leaders is important for productivity. After all, if workers feel safe and comfortable in their surroundings, they are more likely to come up with new ideas, take risks and admit to problems and mistakes. Feeling cared for by a supervisor is the result of an emotional bond of trust.

The issue is that we’ve never had more excuses to not listen. As technology advances and content explodes, we continue to spread our attention across multiple screens, problems, and people often all at once. As a result, attention has become one of the scarcest resources and one of the most valuable. People who can truly listen have a unique edge in a world fragmented by distraction. They deal not just with stimulus but with engagement, not just with interaction but with connection. Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. To listen is to be fully present to what someone else is saying, to process their words without distraction, and to seek to understand them before trying to be understood ourselves. Listening is the currency of rapport, and the window into trust, connection, and mutual engagement. The quality of our conversations, our relationships, and our reputations all hinge on how well we can do this one simple activity. Here are ways to build emotional connections:

Practice active listening. People can tell whether you’re listening by your verbal responses and your body language. When you make eye contact and nod as they’re speaking, you send a different message than if you were staring into space. The words you use and your body language are part of a larger skillset called active listening, a process in which the listener responds to the speaker by actively processing, re-stating and responding to what they’ve heard. Active listening is crucial to communication and relationships. In order to get someone interested in you, you have to be interested in them. The most obvious form of active listening is responding.

Connect on an emotional level. A lot of people listen on a logical level. That’s the most straightforward way to guide a conversation, and it’s frequently the safest. However, if you want to really connect with someone, you’ll have to listen to them on an emotional level. Go beyond connecting concepts and ideas, and delve into the feelings behind those concepts and ideas. This is crucial in developing meaningful relationships. When you listen to someone emotionally, you show empathy. When you empathize, you recognize that someone else is as real as you. Empathy is one of the most endearing and resonating emotional connections you can have with someone else. Behind everything, someone says to you, whether they’re facts or opinions, there’s an emotion tied to it. Logical connections are about finding commonalities and interests. But the one ultimate thing that connects all of us is emotions. Each of us may have gone through different things, but we’ve all felt the same emotions. In order to build an emotional connection, share moments in your life where you’ve felt the same emotions. Learn about people’s personal narratives: their past, present, and future. Because personal narratives are so meaningful, most people don’t willingly open up about them to everyone. You might have to make the first move. It will be uncomfortable. If you don’t talk about your past, present, or future much, you probably realize that the people in your life aren’t willing to share this stuff either. It’s challenging to build relationships and emotional connections without first being a bit vulnerable and sharing your personal narrative first. Show your emotions, elicit their emotions, and then connect the two. By doing this you’ll notice your friendships and relationships going deeper and becoming richer.

Focus on the other person with questions. When you worry about the “right” thing to say, you’re not listening. If you were, your brain would be focused on what the other person was saying. Therefore, every time you start worrying about what to say next, that’s a helpful reminder to reinvest in the conversation. Asking questions will prevent a common mistake, which is focusing on yourself instead of other people. It sets the stage for you to form an emotional connection with someone. Remember always, their story should take greater priority over your story. Questions prevent you from talking about yourself. Think about, and feel, what the other person said.

Pay attention to how they’re saying it. We know that the majority of our communication is done without words. Since this is the case, listening means paying attention to how someone says something. You listen to their pauses, their tone, their diction, and you look at their body language and how it shifts. This whole pictures will give you insight to their emotions and what they really mean. Develop your sensitivity to changes in their speech and body language. You can also use quiet moments and pauses to get more clues into how someone is feeling. If they’re interested in continuing a conversation with you, their natural reaction will be to ask a question and get to know you better. If they’re not, well, the quiet might last longer than you’d be comfortable with.

Dig beyond listening comprehension and logical connections. Build an emotional connection so you can empathize with the other person and get an idea of how they’re feeling. Sometimes, the uncomfortable or intense parts of a conversation can be the most beautiful.