Interpersonal Communication - Active Listening

Active listening will be the first of many posts on interpersonal communication based on the mind tools website. This is a very interesting area for me. To have poor interpersonal communications skills (which include active listening), your productivity will suffer simply because you do not have the tools needed to influence, persuade and negotiate – all necessary for workplace success. You can be the smartest person in the room, but if you cannot communicate nobody will benefit from this and your ability will not be utilised.

Active Listening
You must be able to listen attentively if you are to:
- perform to expectations
- avoid conflicts and misunderstandings
- succeed - in any arena.
Following are a few short tips to help you enhance your communications skills and to ensure you are an active listener:

1. Start by Understanding Your Own Communication Style
Good communication skills require a high level of self-awareness. Understanding your personal style of communicating will go a long way toward helping you to create good and lasting impressions on others. By becoming more aware of how others perceive you, you can adapt more readily to their styles of communicating. This does not mean you have to be a chameleon, changing with every personality you meet. Instead, you can make another person more comfortable with you by selecting and emphasizing certain behaviors that fit within your personality and resonate with another. In doing this, you will prepare yourself to become an active listener.

2. Be An Active Listener
People speak at 100 to 175 words per minute (WPM), but they can listen intelligently at 600 to 800 words per minute. Since only a part of our mind is paying attention, it is easy to go into mind drift - thinking about other things while listening to someone.

• For each meeting you should highlight a list of points and/or questions you would like the speaker to clarify. You can either ask the speaker explicitly each of these or try answer them from what they say. This will give your listening purpose. These can be combined with the points you would like to cover yourself.
  

• If you're finding it particularly difficult to concentrate on what someone is saying, try repeating their words mentally as they say it - this will reinforce their message and help you control mind drift.

• For each word you hear (or read) try to create a mental image for it. This will greatly help you to concentrate on what the speaker has to say and greatly improve your memory.

• Take notes using key-words only. Even best letter cant transcribe that fast. Use a dictiphone if possible.

• Ask questions which show you have listened and understand. But don't interrupt.

• Following up is key! This can be done with an email to thank and summarise the main points - the minutes.
  

3. Use Nonverbal Communication
Use nonverbal behaviors to raise the channel of interpersonal communication. Nonverbal communication is facial expressions like smiles, gestures, eye contact, nodding and even your posture.

This shows the person you are communicating with, that you are indeed listening actively and will prompt further communications while keeping costly, time-consuming misunderstandings at a minimum.

4. Give Feedback
Remember that what someone says and what we hear can be amazingly different! Our personal filters, assumptions, judgments, and beliefs can distort what we hear.

• Repeat back or summarize to ensure that you understand.Restate what you think you heard and ask, "Have I understood you correctly?"
  

• Confirm that you and speaker are on the same wave-length. "What I believe you just said is ZZZ; Have I understood you correctly?"

• If you want the speaker to speak as much as possible use gestures to show you agree, understand and are interested:

• "Right, OK, Yes, Sure, I agree, That is true, Oh really, I see, That is interesting,..
• Can you clarify please, can you illustrate with an example, explain further,.."
• Be emphatetic in your feedback and paraphrasing.
  

Feedback is a verbal communications means used to clearly demonstrate you are actively listening and to confirm the communications between you and others.

5. Jott down questions that may arise.
Resist the urge two pepper the speaker with too many questions, jott down possible questions. Many times the answer to your question may be in the message if you contine listening.

6. Take notes
Transcribe the key notes from the meeting. If possible ask the speaker for permission to use a dictiphone, 'that you can turn off at any point'!

7. Be able to 'Parrot'
Try summarise the key sections by providing:
facts, thoughts and beliefs you heard, convey underlying feelings, communicate the speakers needs and wants. This allows the user to add anything she missed or clarify any discrepancies.

To be an effective listner you need to Strike a balance between listening and responding. If you are unsure be sure to ask the seaker to 'further explain'.