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The Lost Art of Listening
By TWilson | April 10, 2008
You have two ears, one mouth, and used in direct proportion to each other. I know many of you have heard this adage. It suggests that we should do more listening and less talking. I like the one that goes like this, “better to let someone think you’re a fool than open you mouth and prove it true.” Both focus on the admonition to listen to before venturing forth an opinion.
Consider the following, you son or daughter come in and tell you that they want to drop out of school because they feel their teachers don’t understand them. What is your first reaction? I think most of us would move in the direction of telling them about the benefits of staying in school. That without and education their chances of getting a good job are limited at best. Some of you would even say, “Over my dead body” with a strong dose of how you sacrificed for them and that doing such a thing is being selfish and ungrateful.
What happens? Your child leaves frustrated and despondent, feeling guilty of bringing the subject up. If that was you goal, congratulations you achieved it. But, if your goal was to find out what was troubling them, you missed it entirely. You only heard the first part of the statement, the part that caused you to react and go into super parent mode. The part you needed to hear was the latter, the part that they don’t think their teachers understand them.
The art of listening wasn’t in play for you. The art of short cutting via stereo-typing was in play. When faced with this type of situation we use our knowledge of what a life is like without a decent education. Many of us have friends or relatives who thought they could make it without the benefit of a decent education, and immediately we go into hyper mode to prevent our children from going down that path. It’s only natural.
Everyone has the desire to protect love ones from making the type of decisions we believe can be harmful. However, the objective is to listen I mean really listen. Doing this is the most effective way we can provide help to our family members. In our short scenario, the real issue is the child feels that their teachers don’t understand them. By waiting, we get a fuller picture of what may be the real problem. Consider the following:
“I want to drop out of school, my teachers don’t understand me.”
“Wow, that’s different from yesterday. Yesterday, you were excited about getting to class to present your project. What happened?”
“It’s Mr. Dell, I did everything he told us to do and had all the points in my presentation. It was right out of the book. It was everything he said we should do. And he told me I wasn’t being creative, I wasn’t thinking for myself that I needed to put my own thoughts into it not just repeat what the book said. I followed the instructions, and gave him what was in the book and he still didn’t like it. He doesn’t understand me.”
By really listening, you start to get to what may be the real problem. I’m being deliberate, in my statement “you start to,” for this reason, sometimes it takes asking a series of questions before we get to the real problem along with really listening, we must also be patient. People will eventually tell you what is bothering them.
As parents, we can easily fall into the parent trap of knowing what’s best for our children, and be quick to dispense advice with anecdotes that underlie and support the advice we are giving. After all we’ve seen it all, been through it and understand the consequences of making bad choices. We are just trying to prevent what may have happen to us or friends and family members of ours, from happening to our children.
As coaches and consultants we have a wealth of experience and knowledge and like the example above, we can short-cut our listening to our clients, because we’ve heard it before and we’re quick to offer a process or solution that’s worked for us in the past. But when we do this, we are setting ourselves up as vendors not advisors.
We owe it to our clients to make sure that we are really listening to them. If we take the time to slow the process down and really listen to what they are saying, we will be in a better position to help the with their problem thus providing true value to our clients making us advisors as oppose to vendors.
Topics: Communication |
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