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Building Relationships Through Likability: Slow Down Your Thinking (4 Essential Questions for Keeping Your Focus as a Listener), with Michelle Lederman, Connection Instigator and Author, The 11 Laws of Likability
Listening is hard. I know we’re doing it all the time, but it’s hard. It’s hard to maintain our focus. There’s so many things going on nowadays that keeping that attention on the speaker is difficult. Add to that that we have tendencies. And what I want to challenge all of you with is to understand what your listening tendencies are. I’m an interrupter. I get so excited – they said something, it sparked an idea, and I went, “Oh, oh, oh”, and I want to jump in.
If you know what your tendencies are, then you can put mechanisms in place to manage them. What are your tendencies? Do you jump to conclusions? Do you finish somebody’s sentence? Do you start planning what you’re going to say next? Are you Pavlovian about the cell phone beep, and that you can’t help yourself but look? Go through that list in your mind of, “What are the things that I need to counter, so that I can keep my focus?”
1. What don’t I know?
A great technique to enhance your listening is to slow your thinking down. As human beings, it is in our nature to draw conclusions. That’s not a bad thing. Don’t judge yourself for judging. We need to. We need to take in information and draw conclusions, judgments, assumptions about situations. What I want you to do is stay open to being wrong. And the way you can do that is to slow your thinking down. There’s four questions I often tell people to ask themselves, and you don’t have to ask all four. But any one or two of these questions can help slow your thinking down, so you can stay listening and not always drawing conclusions so quickly when somebody is speaking.
Question number one: “What don’t I know?” What don’t I know about the situation? If I stay curious and I realize I don’t know what I don’t know, I’m still willing to take more information in.
2. How else can I interpret that?
“How else can I interpret that?” Another way to phrase question two is, “What could be another reason for that?” With these questions, you could go crazy. You could say they were snatched by body snatchers on their way to work, and that’s why they’re late. Even though you know that’s not what happened, it does slow your thinking down enough to say there’s a possibility that the reason they’re late is not because they’re irresponsible slackers. Maybe there’s a reason. And maybe there’s another way to interpret what’s happened. Maybe time is just not important to them and that they don’t realize it’s important to us.
3. What if I’m wrong?
Question number three: “What if I’m wrong?” It’s really powerful to think about, “If I am wrong about my conclusion, my assumption, how does that impact the relationship? How does that impact the project, the work, the results, the long-term?” That really will slow you in your tracks – “What if I’m wrong?”.
4. Do I want to be right?
Question four: “Do I want to be right?” I hate this question – of course we want to be right. Everybody wants to be right. And not only do we want to be right, we are going to take in information and use confirmation bias: we’re going to listen to prove what we already think is correct. So ask yourself, “Am I trying to be right? Do I just want to be right in the situation? Am I not able to separate the person from the problem? Am I not able to be objective?” Any one, two, or three of these questions in a situation where you’re quickly drawing those conclusions, and those conclusions might not lead to a great outcome, will slow your thinking down and enable you to keep listening.