How to listen

If listening is an art form, then I am a pretty lousy artist at times. Oh, I may hear what you are saying but because I'm a "fixer" I'm focusing more on the solution to your problem that I'm going to give to you once you stop talking - that is if I haven't interrupted you by now. Listening is one if those skills that I have been working on becoming more proficient with and thankfully I've run across some good resources to assist me in my quest.

Steve Ogne and Tim Roehl's collaborative effort Transformissional Coaching includes a chapter devoted entirely to the art of listening. Their core premise is that,

"When you listen to people, you gain a great deal of credibility in their eyes. Empathetic listening makes a major contribution to a person's emotional bank account. People want to be heard."

There is certainly truth to the old saying, "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." When we listen to people, we communicate to them that we respect and value them. This also helps us to avoid jumping to premature conclusions and hence giving misinformed and I'll-timed answers and suggestions. Stephen Covey describes the art of listening very well:

"To truly listen means to transcend your own autobiography, to get out of your frame of reference, out of your own value system, out of your own history and judging tendencies, and to get deeply into the frame of reference or viewpoint of another person. This is called empathetic listening. It is a very, very rare skill."

Listening - truly listening - is hard! But so that we aren't so hard in ourselves if we discover that our listening skills are lacking, let me leave you with a few nuggets of goodness when it comes to the art of listening:

• History repeats itself because no one listens the first time. (Anonymous)
• Boredom is having to listen to someone talk about himself when I want to talk about me. (Tom Paciorek)
• No one ever listened themselves out of a job. (Calvin Coolidge)
• Most people don't listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. (Stephen Covey)
• Most of us are most of the time
chiefly concerned with getting our own view across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of our own ideas. (S. I. Hayakawa)
• Effective listeners remember that "words have no meaning - people have meaning." (Effective Listening, Key to Your Success)
• The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention. (Richard Moss)
• Hearing is a faculty; listening is an art. (Unknown)