We’re all talking but nobody’s listening

Listening – the hidden skill of influence

If you had to choose a single skill that would guarantee the gift of influence, what would you choose? Would it be the skill of a confident presenter; someone who can stand in front of a large group and entertain and persuade? Would it be the skill of a wordsmith; someone who can shape language and tell a story that connects with an audience? Or would it be the skill of a great listener; someone who is able to maintain deep and focused attention? In our quest for influence we are often attracted to those skills that appear to be of greatest value; the public profile of the speaker or writer. These are both important skills in our toolkit, but the greatest gift of all is often what appears to be most ordinary and least difficult. If you become a master at the other skills but fail to build your skill as a listener, the other skills will be largely wasted. You may come across as someone who has knowledge, who’s confident and a good communicator, but you won’t have true influence. The art of listening is what truly influential people do. It’s what makes them great.

Remember – listening is a radical act in a world that loves to talk.

In the toolkit of influence, the art of listening is the most influential skill of them all – listening is the foundation upon which every other skill depends. Because if you don’t really listen, you’re likely to miss the important information from your team, your employees, your colleagues and your friends. Yet when you ask most people what they want in order to become more influential they say: ‘I want to be taken more seriously.’ Or, ‘I want them to listen to me.’ Or, ‘I want to be credible and confident when presenting.’ Nobody ever says they want to become a better listener because it’s hard to believe that by not talking we are more persuasive and influential. We grow up believing that we need to have opinions; to become more knowledgeable and expert so people will listen to us. As we progress in our careers we’re expected to have more to say, not less. We feel we need to have the answers, not keep asking questions. And the more senior you are, the more people listen to you – not the other way around. Being listened to is a mark of status and respect. In business meetings, it’s the senior people that get the lion’s share of the floor. So the very idea of saying less, of sitting back and observing and listening seems counter-intuitive as a way to increase influence. What if somebody else gets in before you? What if they have the great idea first? In a world full of speakers, listening can just feel like you’ve given up the race.

Are you listening?

Have you heard these phrases recently: ‘You’re not hearing me.’ Or, ‘That’s not what I said.’ Or, ‘You’re missing the point.’ And if you’re a leader or manager have you heard employees say ‘They don’t care what we think.’ Or, ‘They don’t want to know what’s really going on.’ If you have, then chances are you may be in the habit of hearing without really listening. Or perhaps you’re on the receiving end? When was the last time somebody remained silent even after you stopped talking because they noticed you were still thinking? How do you feel when other people jump in before you’ve finished your sentence? Or they look around the room or check their phone message while you’re speaking? How many meetings have you been to where most people in the room are looking everywhere else, but at the speaker?

On average, we listen to each other for eight seconds before we either interrupt or actively stop listening. Eight seconds. That’s not enough time to boil a kettle. Interrupting is not only butting in, it starts the moment the voice in our head starts to rehearse our answer, or search for similar anecdotes or for the perfect bit of advice. Then we wait for the smallest of gaps in the conversation – an in-breath, a moment of silence, a pause, a look to the side – and then we jump in and off we go. It’s a habit most of us are not even aware of. We think we’re listening when all we’re doing is waiting to speak. So the first thing to do is to find out how good a listener you are and then practise turning up your attention dial and your power to influence through deep attention.

What neuroscience can teach us about listening

Hearing has evolved as our primary alarm system because it operates out of sight and works even when you’re asleep. The auditory system is like a volume control and filters out sounds that you don’t need to pay attention to. But if we hear a sudden noise our ‘startle response’ system warns us about any danger that occurs outside awareness. We have what neuroscientists call ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ attention. Bottom-up attention is when we hear something that intrudes, like hearing our name spoken by somebody on the other side of the room, while top-down attention is where we consciously choose to pay attention to what we’re hearing.

The temporal lobe (Fig. 3.1a) is responsible for automatic hearing and for recognising patterns in sound waves so that we can process sound into language. We engage our frontal lobe (Fig. 3.1b) when we begin to pay conscious attention and our limbic system when we tune into the deeper level of meaning – emotional content, tone and nuance, body language, energy and emotional state in others. Deep attention takes a significant amount of cognitive effort and so requires us to engage the limbic system (Fig. 3.1c). We need to practise if we are to become deep listeners.

FIGURE 3.1 The primary level of processing is the auditory cortex, which then feeds information to the secondary auditory cortex and then on into the brain for further processing (interpretation, links with memory, imagery, etc.).

Hearing is easy, it’s automatic, we can’t turn it off, but using top-down attention is hard when distractions are leaping into our ears every fifty-thousandth of a second. For an untrained mind, it is easy to be distracted by sounds, sights and other distractions such as telephones ringing and email ‘pings’. It can take a lot of brain energy to re-focus our thoughts as we experience multiple distractions. We might believe that we can work or listen while doing other things, or that we can ‘half’ listen, but our brains just don’t work like that.

The deadly habits of poor listening

There are many reasons why we might hear what’s being said but fail to listen – here are the most common ones:

• We don’t practise: Listening is like any skill, it requires practice. Most of us have spent our lives interrupting, jumping in, losing attention and letting our thoughts wander.
• We don’t value it as a skill: Businesses place greater emphasis on the skills of talking, presenting, knowing, advising, telling, consulting and selling. It’s little wonder that listening seems like the poor cousin of these communication skills. There are few businesses that teach listening skills in leadership training.
• We’re impatient: We find it hard to sit still and stay open to the other person. If we’re under stress the brain operates under par and we can find it difficult to give somebody our full attention.
• The voice in our head: It’s not possible to listen to somebody else at the same time as listening to the voice in our head – our own thinking drowns out our ability to pay attention to what the other person is saying.
• We judge: We think we know where the other person’s thinking is going and stop really listening.
• Distractions: In this world of open plan offices, telephones, ‘always-on’ social media, the ringing of mobile phones, emails, sound bites, banter and the thousands of background sounds that interrupt us all day, we often find ourselves holding conversations and meetings while being assaulted by endless and constant auditory distractions. Turning down our ‘bottom-up’ attention and turning up our ‘top-down’ attention requires discipline and effort.
• We’re afraid of what we might hear: Sometimes we think it’s just easier not to find out. Listening might mean we need to change tack, reverse a decision, feel less certain or expose ourselves to being challenged.

The power of deep listening

So how can listening become a tool of influence? Nancy Kline is a pioneer in encouraging deep thinking to improve the quality of our lives, schools and workplaces. In her 2009 book, More Time to Think, she says, ‘The quality of everything human beings do, everything – everything – depends on the quality of the thinking we do first’ (p. 16). Since 1973, Nancy Kline has been exploring what conditions enable people to do their best thinking and has developed what she calls ‘The Thinking Environment’ which comprises ten core components, one of which is the skill of listening:

If you give attention of generative quality, born of deep interest in what the person thinks and will say next, they will think better around you than they will if you interrupt them or listen only in order to reply (p. 31). Attention is an act of creation. Listening to reply is different from listening to ignite. As the thinker, knowing you will not be interrupted frees you truly to think for yourself (p. 33).

There’s a sort of magic that happens when we truly attend to one another, when we offer our undivided attention and listen. We can all learn to give and receive the benefits of attention to change our world and positively influence others. Every important meeting, conversation or sale where you want to persuade somebody to buy your idea requires a huge dose of listening. If you don’t notice what’s working and what isn’t, if you can’t pick up non-verbal clues, if you don’t ask the really important questions and then sit back and listen then you’re almost certain to fail. There’s no greater gift we can give to others than our undivided attention and there’s no more important skill we can practise if we want to increase our influence.

Leonard Waks of Temple University, Philadelphia, believes that simply listening in silence may not be sufficient and that to be truly effective listeners we need to give others our undivided inner attention also. In 2008 Waks wrote that:

Maintaining outer silence is not always sufficient to counter the negative impact on listening created by the restless external questioner … To counter it, listeners may need to refrain not merely from asking questions out loud, and thus distracting speakers and obscuring their meanings, but also from entertaining inner questions and other thoughts that distract themselves as listeners from the speaker’s intent (and may subtly influence the speaker as well). That is, if listeners seek to grasp speakers’ full intent, they will do well to maintain an inner silence.

(Waks, L, 2008, Listening from silence: inner composure and engagement, p. 67)

Listen out and listen in

While it’s important to listen to others we also need to pay attention to what’s happening for us on the inside. Listening to our own internal voice, our automatic responses and our emotional reactions can help us develop our own emotional self-awareness. We need to tune in to us in order to learn. It can be really difficult to listen to others when we are overwhelmed, stressed or under a lot of pressure – build in time to notice what’s going on for you.

How can we encourage others to listen?

Do you know people who continually interrupt? What happens to your emotional state when people keep interrupting you? How can you influence others to listen more deeply and with better attention? There are some people who are poor listeners and quick to interrupt. If you know somebody like this, the first thing to do is notice your own reaction. Do you get angry? Do you withdraw? Do you avoid them? Or do you interrupt back and get into a conversational tennis match? If you react in any of these ways you may be reinforcing their behaviour. Here are some suggestions for dealing with people who are not good listeners:

• Listen more, listen better: If you tend to withdraw your attention from the person they will most likely sense it and unconsciously continue to talk in order ‘to be heard’. The next time you speak give them your full and undivided attention and create a sense of ease for them. Take the approach that you will be the best listener first rather than internally ‘stonewalling’ them. When people feel really heard they are able to relax and become more prepared to listen in return.
• Ask for equality: If the person continues to take the lion’s share of the conversation, ask for equality. Get yourself in a positive frame of mind and think about something you would like to speak to them about. Ask them for some of their time for you to explore the topic and for them to simply listen. Make the ground rules clear: you are not looking for advice but it would help for you to think through something with them. By framing it as a favour and being clear about what your needs are this will give them an opportunity to practise listening and you the opportunity to be listened to by them. Set a time boundary, say five to ten minutes. Then swap. By doing this exercise you may well help to break the unconscious pattern. You will also create a better balance between listening and being listened to.
• Say it like it is: If you tell somebody how important it is to you to be listened to equally and they continue to interrupt ask them for permission for you to point this out gently when they do this. You might be surprised at how effective this is and how valued it is by the other person. People are often aware of their own habits, but might find them difficult to change. You will be offering them a gift if you do this with compassion and then reinforce how much you appreciate them listening.
• Team talk: If you are a manager you are in the best position to make deep listening a habit in your team. For a section of your team meetings, be explicit that everyone will give their opinion or views on a topic and the rest of the team will listen with real attention. Again set the ground rules: when people listen they should maintain eye contact and pay attention. Give every person equal time.

What leaders can learn about the art of listening

I’ve spent years in corporate businesses that say they want to listen to employees but found few who really mean it. Listening can be uncomfortable. Listening sometimes means you have to face uncomfortable truths. In some situations there’s nothing quite as scary as sitting down face to face and having authentic, uncomfortable conversations – but listening to your employees might just be the most radical thing you can do to improve your business.

The hidden power of questions

What are some practical ways to make listening a positive habit of influence in your life and business? Simple – ask great questions then sit back and listen to the answers.

If the quality of the thinking we do can change our lives, then questions are the secret weapon in directing our thinking to the place it most needs to go. When we ask the right question of others we encourage them to dig deeper in their thinking and we signal that we want to listen more deeply. When we make statements, or give opinions we can close down the other person’s thinking, but when we ask questions we move people into creative thinking mode.