I don’t know the exact origins but for many years now I have often said to colleagues that we have two eyes, two ears and one mouth, and that is the proportion in which we should use them.
The management literature abounds with entreaties for us to listen better, to develop listening skills, to be reactive listeners, and to listen first before speaking.
But have we learnt the lesson? Experience would suggest not.
The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand. We listen to respond. (Stephen Covey)
Yes it is true.
- we are waiting for the gaps, or the breaks, or when we think the speaker has finished or when our need to interject gets the better of us.
- we break the sequence of discussion, or inject content of little value, or just say the same thing again.
we listen to respond, building our own ideas, not necessarily creatively building on the ideas of others, and not tuning into their concerns or problems.
We just fail to listen.
In conversations we spend most of the time formulating our reply to the person we’re speaking to. So much so that we forget to actually listen to them.
Which in turn prevents us from fully understanding and appreciating what they are saying – we miss the messages and opportunities they convey, or fail to understand their problems.
So listen first, test your understanding of what the speaker is saying, then think about your response.
Treat the speaker the way you want to be treated.
Interesting! Unless of course you already have an intimate or perhaps better described as knowledgeable, relationship with one and other that disperses any power differential.
I’m thinking of both my wife and my sons. When engaged with a close friend, they appear to be both talking at the same time, constantly interrupting, but in a beautifully synchronized sort of mutual train of thought and often in two languages. More dancefloor than courtroom, perhaps?
Not one of my skills!