Are you listening?

The second newsletter is (mainly) about listening

The difference between 1 and 2 is huge.

Way bigger than the difference between 2 and 3. Forget about 3 and 4, and so on.

I don’t mean mathematically (although that’s also true I believe…). I mean in terms of personal consistency.

Doing something twice makes it a series.

While going from zero to 1 is important, one time could just be a coincidence. A one-off. An all too easy-to-forget blip in the vastness of this universe.

Two signifies something bigger. Suddenly, there’s momentum, excitement. Might this be the start of a streak?

James Clear’s rule is: never miss twice. Because if you skip once, that’s a singular event. When you do so twice, that’s a habit.

In newsletter terms, so far so good :)

The difference between hearing and listening.

Listening is a big step up from hearing. Where hearing is passive, listening is active. It’s adding the power of your brain to using just your ears.

Listening is reaching out.

Going above and beyond to understand what your conversation partner is trying to say. 

Listening is not sitting back in your throne and waiting for people to produce something clear, precise and understandable for you to judge with a picky finger.

We don’t know what we mean until we hear ourselves say something out loud. We don’t speak in fully formed speeches. We mess around. Expect people to mumble, fumble, and jumble (yay for me for rhyming and making sense).

Go help them out and reach for what they mean.

Conversations in your mind

Intently listening to people isn’t easy. It requires attention. It’s very common to hear some of their words vaguely in the background while you’re going through your grocery list. Snapping out of it at the last second so you could just hear their last word and mumble a ‘yeah right’, or ‘wow, really’ to them.

This mind chatter (highly important stuff no doubt) is always going on, even when people speak to you. And they can feel that you’re not really listening.

We all need a lot of mindfulness, presence and Eckhart Tolle in our life to be able to focus on another person instead of thinking what you're gonna say next.

It takes a lot of practice for this way of communicating to become a habit.

Course: How to become a better listener

I’m getting ready to launch a small-cohort course on how to become a better listener. This course will cover all the fundamentals of having a supportive conversation.

A lot of smaller experiments came before building the full course. Two of those experiments I want to highlight here.

Last September I organized a workshop on supportive conversation where I presented some of the building blocks of becoming a better listener. We focused on practicing reflections and cultivating a mindful focus on the other person. It was an in-depth workshop of 90 minutes where we covered a lot of ground.

During the last cohort of Write of Passage (WoP) I saw the need for writers to work out their ideas out loud and started what I called ‘sparring gyms’ (continuing the workout-themed ‘writing gym’ and ‘feedback gym’ that were already part of the course).

Contrasting the sparring gyms with the 90-minute workshop, I had to come up with an ultra-compressed version of the same idea; how to listen to your conversation partner and give them room to think?

Below is what I came up with. If nothing else, these simple tips will help you to become a better listener in 5 minutes or less.

Become a better listener in 5 minutes using these 3 tips

• Use silence.

  • Bite your tongue and make it uncomfortable and awkward. Awkward is good. Shut up. As long as you can. Make the other person break the silence and jump in.

• Use reflection.

  • Repeat their last point (or sentence) back to them. This works better when you try to guess what they mean instead of simply repeating their exact words. But even that works. It’s an invitation to continue to talk.

• Use ‘what do you mean?’

  • This ‘trick’ comes the closest to what I would call a cheat code for becoming a better listener instantly. Even better if you ask what they mean by… (one of their last words)’. For example, when someone says ‘I want to start meditating.’ Ask something like: ‘what do you mean when you say meditation?’

Improving your listening skills is a life-long practice, but these bullets will get you going.

Are you interested in improving your listening skills? I’ll share more details in next week’s newsletter.