This post is part of our Weekly Tips series.
I have yet to meet someone in a consultative role who doesn’t understand—and even extoll—the virtues of listening. I have also yet to meet someone who doesn’t have room to improve, including myself. Today’s tip features a four-point assessment to help you hone your listening skill.
The kind of listening that engenders deep trust and promotes real relationships is a kind of listening that requires that we pay very close attention. That’s where most of us fall down, because we all deal with ongoing, everyday interference. Like static on a radio station, this interference is sometimes loud and sometimes faint. But it’s pretty much always there.
Consider these four barriers to paying attention:
Here’s a brief snippet from a typical internal dialogue:
Client: [says something work-related]
Your little voice: Uh oh. I should have spent more time preparing for this meeting. You know, I’m not sure I even like this guy.
Client: [says something work-related]
Your little voice: I do like his tie. And his suit.
Your little voice: Suit! Shoot! I forgot to drop off my laundry on the way in to work today!
(And so it goes …)
The question isn’t whether you deal with these attention-derailers; the question is when and how.
This week, focus on the barrier to paying attention that plagues you the most, and experiment with ways to minimize it. Make one small change.
For example, if you have a habit of talking, employ a practice like counting to three or taking a deep breath before you interject in a conversation. If you succumb to everyday distractions, turn off all the alerts on your devices that pull your attention away from a conversation, or declare blocks of time in your calendar for uninterrupted work. If your little internal voice is a persistent interrupter, practice noticing it and bringing your attention back to the task or conversation at hand. If you have a fear of intimacy, practice being more empathetic in your interactions (I promise you will live to tell the tale).
Note what differences even small improvements make—for you and for your relationships.
Read one of my all-time favorite articles, The Point of Listening is Not What You Hear but the Listening Itself, from our friends at Trusted Advisor Associates, or brush up on how to listen to build intimacy in Chapter 6 of The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook.