Ep. #78 Active Listening: The Key to Unlocking Deeper Trust in Relationships

Hi and welcome to Making Sense of Work. One of the greatest gifts we give others is our presence. Being in the present and in the moment with someone can be the most profound thing we do in any working day and in our personal lives. In fact, I believe that in many ways being really present and listening intently is the most important part of being human at work. Because unless we listen, we can't understand others. We don't hear their perspectives. We're not aware of their ideas, their unique thoughts, their opinions. We also don't hear their concerns and we don't hear them. And so in today's episode, I want to share a bit about how I see See listening and presence, how I experience it myself and how we can learn to be more effective at offering others our presence, how we can listen more deeply. We've created some guide notes to go with this podcast. And if you'd like to download those, you can go to baileybelfer. com, navigate to the blog page and you'll find them there. We'll put a link in the show notes. A leader on a program we were running recently was coaching in one of our practice groups. In these groups, the person who coaches, who is the coach, gets a lot of feedback on their coaching. We create a very supportive environment for this. And when we were giving this, when I was giving this person feedback, I described something called the 80 20 rule, which we hold in coaching. And this is simple. It's that the coach is listening 80 percent of the time. And And And Only talking 20 percent or sometimes less of the time. And in this case, I gently observed and reflected how the coach was kind of nearer the other way around, nearer to doing 80 percent of the talking. And for this coach, it was a really big, a moment of awareness. It was really nice awareness for the person. A few weeks later, they mentioned to me that they had gone away and reflected on this and realized that when they were with their team, they also did most of the talking. Uh, this person is a senior leader, managing senior and experienced people. But when they were with them in that environment, they talked instead of listening. They noticed how they were triggered to give advice and kind of expected things to happen. And so they. Decided to turn it around and made a quick turnaround, aiming for 20 percent talking and 80 percent listening. And they said the impact was immediate. The first thing that happened was that the team, of course, started sharing ideas. And basically they were saying, of course, we know what to do. We're senior people. And the other. Perhaps surprising thing was that their productivity increased because I think that as they were listened to, they were empowered to act. They had the choice to do what they thought was best, to use their own mind, their own decision making capability to take their own ideas and implement them. And this change wasn't really that complicated. It was just making the shift. It was committing to being more quiet and listening to with curiosity and thank you to the leader. Who shared this example with me. I think though, there's a challenge for all of us. And I include myself in this. And that's that we actually have to make a decision to listen and to be fully present because talking is for most of us, quite easy. And if we're not talking, we're often actually not listening. We're distracted. We're doing other things. We're thinking of other things. And I've come to see that listening is an active act. It's not passive because it involves us. Thinking about focus and energy and commitment to others when, as I've said, we're often just distracted and busy and we find it really hard to offer the kind of presence that's really needed. I really include myself in this. I know that I've worked so much on my listening because it's such a core part of the work that I do, and yet I know it's so easy for me to fall off the wagon, to not be listening, to be distracted. The nature of presence is that it involves us to be fully in the moment with the person we're with. And that really is without distraction or without devices, just really listening and being present with that person. And I think that presence doesn't have to be over a long period of time. We can offer somebody Our presence and our full listening for a minute and it can make all the difference for people. You will know that the other side of this is that when we aren't present and we aren't listening, the person we're with kind of knows it. They know when we're listening. And they know when we're thinking about something or someone else. And I think this happens on the phone. Even if you're talking to somebody on the phone and they can't see you, your audio only. I think if we're not really listening, if we're doing emails or other things, the other person knows. And I think even if we're. Doing six things and answering messages in chat, and we're not thinking about the writing that we're doing, we're also not being present with the person. I like to think about presence as an act of being. I am being with this person, and I see listening as an act of doing. It's something I'm conscious about actively doing. We are in service of the person we're listening to. And when I'm present and listening, I am both being present and doing listening. And I'm offering them a gift. I'm offering that person the opportunity to be really heard. When I'm present and listening and giving the other person my full attention, I'm also choosing to be aware of them as a whole person. I'm listening for all that they are sharing. I'm listening to who they are. I'm listening beyond the words. As I was preparing for this, I was thinking about where do I feel presence in my body and where do I feel listening and I became aware that mostly I feel presence in my body because it feels like it's a whole body activity that I'm bringing my Whole system into presence with the other person and listening is slightly more in my mind because it's it is more of a conscious decision to listen and there's something about them together that they create this ability as I've said to hear the whole person to be aware of them. But doing that also gives us access to our intuition. To be aware of the other person's feelings, how they're triggering us, and what they're bringing up in us, but also our own awareness of what we might be hearing that we could reflect back to the other person. Things that they may not be aware they're saying that we can help them to see. So, how good is your listening? Now, I'm guessing that you might say pretty good, because I think we all generally believe that we're pretty good listeners. And What I've seen for myself, as I've said, is that my own story and journey has shown me that there's always room for improvement. About, about 20 years ago, I had the privilege of training with Nancy Klein in what's called the thinking environment. I learned so much from Nancy through training with her and through her book, Time to Think. And I learned that just being present changes the quality of my listening immeasurably. And through that training and through that time, it impacted everything about how I am with people. It's impacted how we teach coaching. It's impacted how I listen to my loved ones. And along the process, I was Lucky enough in that training to gain two lifelong friends. And I guess some of that was because we listened deeply to each other during the 10 days of training we had. So I was pretty confident when I started that training that I was a good listener. I'd grown up in a household where listening was important and I'd. Done lots of training. I was a coach. I was pretty confident, but as I went through that training, it became really clear that I was actually only a surface listener. I was listening, but I was also really aware of distractions and tuning into those. I had a lot of. internal noises, my own judgments. And sometimes, you know, I was simply planning dinner in my mind instead of listening. So over the 10 days of the training, we were basically just listening and listening and listening and listening. And I really learned to tune my ear and my presence to be fully with the other person I was with. Nancy describes this as attention and she says that the quality of the attention we offer others impacts the quality of their thinking. She also believes that we don't listen long enough to each other and an early exercise, which you can try now that we do on our coaching program is to invite someone to just listen for somewhere between 3 and 5 minutes. And the rules are you can nod and smile and acknowledge with your face, you can give good eye contact, but you can't talk, you can't ask questions, you can't do anything else. All you can do is give the other person your full attention and listen. And this is incredibly hard. It's, it's really hard. But what I've learned from doing this over and over and over again myself is that when I let go of needing to share an opinion, ask a question, reflect something back, actually I settle into listening. I settle into presence. I don't have to speak. And often when I'm doing this, the other person, feeling deeply listened to, starts to listen to themselves in a different way. They start seeing their own wisdom. in a way they hadn't before. They hear things and realize, oh, I hadn't really known I thought that. So this very act of not interrupting, not even asking questions, I think I'm saying, I believe you, the person I'm listening to, is are an intelligent whole human being. I believe you have depth and wisdom waiting to come to the surface. By closing my mouth and giving you my full attention, I'm creating the environment to help you to do this. I'm making space for you to really think deeply. Nancy also holds a big store on listening very closely to the words a person is using. And when we do reflect back, when we come more in, we use their exact words, not our words, not our interpretation of our, what we heard, we share back just their words. And I recently, just last week, saw this happening very skillfully in a coaching group where the person coaching Did just that. They heard a word the client had said, they reflected it back and just gently asked about it. And for the client, there were new insights and some big connections made. All the coach had to do was simply share one word. I heard you say X and it had an impact. Over the course of our coach training, the students often say how learning to do this well, learning to do presence and listening really well, impacts the whole of their lives. It impacts their work, their home, kids, parents, friends, because when we get better at listening, when we develop our listening muscle, everyone benefits. If you think about yourself now as a listener, When you listen, what are you listening for? Are you listening so that you can respond or ask a question? Or are you listening to what the person is saying, to who they are? Are you listening beyond their words? Are you becoming aware of their feelings, their anxieties, concerns, joy, happiness? Or, as we often are, are you listening and wondering when they'll finish so you can share something or share your own story, or as I said, planning dinner. The trouble with listening is that when we are listening, our egos are so often triggered to share things. We can, we think, Oh, I've got an example of that, or I've got an idea, or here's a concept that's helpful. And so we get back into our own heads and into our own idea. of what's helpful for the person. And a really simple trick to help you overcome this is to just simply say, when somebody's finished talking Ah, okay, so what I heard you say was Followed by have I heard that correctly and this is so simple and it takes us away from the conversation and brings ourselves back to the presence of the other person and so often just saying so what I heard you say was you're struggling a bit with this client opens up more thinking. For the person who's being listened to and it takes them into new ideas and new ways to solve their challenge. So what we're doing instead of sharing our ideas is we're simply reflecting back what we're hearing from the person we're listening to. We can be aware of this in all of our interactions. So if you think about. A meeting that you're in, maybe you can notice this pull to share ideas or even to just talk about business and not be aware of the other people. When we're in meetings, it can be helpful to take time at the beginning of the meeting to ask people how they are and to really listen to what's happening. What that does is it helps us tune into each other and we're. Becoming aware of each other as humans. And I think that when we do that, the workflow is decisions are easier because we have opened ourselves up to listening to different channels, if you like, to different parts of the person. So taking time whenever you're with someone to build trust, to listen deeply and to be curious is very powerful. And you can try this now, find somebody, maybe you're working from home on your own. So ask somebody in your team if they'd like a quick chat and ask them how they are. And then ask them how work's going maybe. And just listen, just practice listening. If you're in the office, you can do it with somebody, maybe go for coffee with somebody and make a commitment to yourself that you're going to listen a lot more than you did normally. And to help you to think about how to do this, think back to your own experience. Think back to times when you felt really listened to and felt really heard. Think about what that was like. Think about what your listener was doing to help you feel like that. And think about how you knew they were present with you. And then try those things. Because for each of us it is very personal and individual how we listen. Some people are very, find eye contact incredibly important. And I believe you can listen very deeply without having to have really close eye contact because the listening is the act of being present in our bodies. You could also think about the times when you didn't feel listened to or heard and think about what was causing that and how do you avoid that? I know, I'm very aware if somebody isn't listening to me and I know when that happens that I lose my inclination to share. And I sometimes feel like withdrawing. If you're working mostly in a virtual world, which actually I do, you can also think about how you can be present and really listening in a virtual world. So of course, on calls, that so, it's so tempting when we're on a call to carry on doing other things. And so even if you're on an audio call, try and stop what you're doing. Turn away from your computer and your devices and really tune in to the other person. And I've already mentioned that I think we can also do this when we're doing instant messaging and sending emails. We can be aware of the other person. We can be present to them in that way. Another way we can learn to be more present is to become aware of ourselves. So this sounds a bit. Uh, counterintuitive, but it's because when we're aware of ourselves, we become aware of the thoughts, the judgments, the distractions that are going on for us. Uh, psychologists talk about this as metacognition. So when I'm listening to somebody, I might also be aware that my mind is saying, Oh, I wouldn't do it like that. Or I don't know what you should do or what time am I supposed to pick the kids up. Because the more I become aware of that, the more able I am to say, okay, I'm just going to tune out that channel and I'm going to tune back into the person I'm with. I'm going to deepen my presence with them and I'm going to become aware of them. It's about learning to hear both of those channels, both our own channel And the channel of the other person. Now sometimes it can be really helpful to listen to our channel because we might be tuning into something, an intuition that might be helpful for the person or what we might be picking up their feelings and we're picking them up ourselves. And so that can also be helpful to be aware of that. With all of this, when you notice that you're distracted or you're got judgments, uh, please don't criticize yourself. This is part of our human nature. Just say, Oh, look, I noticed my mind is doing that. And bring yourself back to the other person. Bring yourself back to presence. Another key element of listening is to be aware that words are only a small part of the conversation. The person we're with will be expressing so much more than the words they're using. As I'm talking about this, I'm noticing I'm using my hands even, even though you can't see me. But paying attention to beyond the words will help the other person. Being aware of body language and maybe noticing that. Being aware of the emotions that they're sharing through their tone of voice. Just being aware and curious about the whole person, listening beyond what they're actually saying and being aware of who they are in that space. So, there's a couple of things that you can do to really begin to build your listening muscle. One is, next time somebody comes up to your desk to ask a question, Take it as a listening opportunity, stop everything you're doing, turn around and face them. Maybe if they're standing stand up, so you're at equal height or invite them to sit down and just become a really, really aware of your listening and resist the temptation to question. Just listen, or if you do ask a question to say what else. Would you like to share, but really tune in to them and listen. Another thing you can do is decide that you're going to become more aware of the different channels that are there. So maybe in a meeting, become aware of a person's body language when they're speaking or become aware of the feelings that they might be sharing. Listen out for. Metaphors they're using and what that might be telling them telling you about how they're feeling and what's going on for them. And as I've said, you could do all of this online. I think learning to listen really well is actually really hard and it's something we can commit to doing and keep. Developing and growing for the rest of our lives so that we get better and better and better at being present with people. And I encourage you to think about it like that. It is like a muscle. We need to develop it. We need to use it for it to grow. I've noticed in myself that it does get easier, even though it's hard. And yet I still fall off the wagon many times. So I encourage you. To be more aware of your listening and your presence and notice slowly how it becomes more natural and also what a gift it is that​we give each other.