The other day I saw this quote by Stephen Covey:
“The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand. We listen to reply.”
I’ve always considered myself a good listener, how about you?
I enjoy paying attention to what others say, but it’s definitely a different kind of listening when we truly want to understand what someone else is saying!
And despite thinking I was good at this particular skill, I got a whole new perspective a few years ago when I received training from a facilitator who was part of the Compassionate Listening Project. Learn more about them here.
What I appreciate the most about learning and utilizing this technique is that it helps me listen more objectively, as opposed to listening to help, problem solve or even respond!
Interested?
At the core of the program, are 3 basic steps.
You can use these with anyone at any time.
Even if you think you’re a good listener, you might find these simple steps illuminating!
Step 1 – Listen for Facts
Here’s the idea: when someone’s talking to you, pay attention to the nuggets or details of what they’re saying.
Perhaps- as an example- your friend just returned from a holiday and is telling you about where they stayed in France.
What you’re doing in this step is confirming what you heard. You want to make sure you’re correct. You do this by repeating some of the facts your friend shared back to them.
So, a response might be, “you went to the south of France!”
Interestingly, when we do this as listeners, it acts as confirmation to the speaker that we're tracking, and they excitedly share more.
Here’s another example: perhaps your granddaughter comes to you and says, “my brother stole my book!”
You could reply, “he stole your book?”
Again, you’re confirming the facts of what the speaker is saying.
Step 2 – Listen for Feelings
While you’re listening for facts, you can also pay attention to how you think the speaker is feeling about what they’re sharing with you.
So, again, with the first example. You could say something like: “sounds like you had fun in France.”
Or with the second example, “and you’re upset that your brother took your book."
This step does two things. It confirms what you suspect the speaker is feeling – because you might be wrong! And it helps offer clarity to the speaker.
Sometimes, in the heat of the moment as a person shares out loud, they might not know what they’re feeling. By having it echoed back, it can offer insight.
As you see, each of these last 2 steps are about confirming information, making sure you are correctly hearing what the speaker wants to share, what transpired, and how they experienced it.
What we’re doing is cultivating a quality of what the Compassionate Listening Project calls the Fair Witness. This is when you allow yourself to enter into a state of mind in which you feel more neutral or objective about what the person is sharing.
Here’s how one of their facilitators describes this:
“the Fair Witness is actually not a person, but rather a perspective: stepping outside oneself and observing from a “bird’s eye view” during an intense interaction, with the ability to stay centered “in the fire” of intensity and strong emotion. It’s as though the Fair Witness observes a situation “from a balcony” in a theatre." (This quote is from a blog, access it here.)
Step 3 – Ask Deepening Questions
Once you’re confident that you have a grasp on the facts of the story the speaker is sharing with you, and how they are feeling about it, you can ask deepening questions.
The idea with this step is to ask what or how questions to get the person thinking more/analyzing what they’re sharing. Additionally, these questions can provide a more well-rounded and complete picture.
Again, from our first example, you could ask – “you mentioned it was hot in France. How did that impact your trip?"
Or with the granddaughter, a deepening question might be: “what would you like to do about it?”
I share these steps with you, because I have found them so helpful.
Why not play around with them?
Maybe do one step at a time and see how it feels, see what happens.
I know they might sound simple and kinda boring, especially to listen for facts. But what I’ve discovered in doing this, is that the speaker gets really animated and excited.
Even when I’ve been the speaker and people have responded to me this way, it was energizing! I never felt like it was redundant, but rather confirming.
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Image courtesy of Erol Ahmed on Unsplash