How to Listen — Book Review

By: Oscar Trimboli

Content: 5/5

Readability: 5/5

Relevance: 5/5

It was past due that I address my listening skills with an intent to improve and be the kid in class again. I find I get distracted easily and or cannot put my mind down to listen to someone else. I jump, interrupt, distract, fidget, and otherwise skip to the end of an explanation. Videos on 2x speed in order to keep up with me.

But really what’s going on is I lack the skills necessary to perceive and interpret someone fully when they speak. There’s more to a delivered line than the words and the definition that line makes up. It’s the tone, the smells, the sounds, the body language, the intentions, the unintended signaling, etc. If I knew all this was relevant and important to fully understanding the complexity of any given person talking, then I would have come along this way a lot sooner.

Either way, here I am. For self, for relationship, and for life.

Enjoy, my summary on How to Listen. Cause I can’t, not nearly half as well as my girlfriend.

Real life starts in the details.

Active Listeners notice what is said.
Deep Listeners explore what is unsaid.

Listening is the willingness to have your mind changed.

The difference between hearing and listening is action.

Before you enter a session where ‘listening’ matters, you should tune yourself. Like in an orchestra, before they start, they arrive early, prepare themselves, tune their instruments to harmonize the sounds with the rest of the orchestra. You should do the same before a session, be ready, prepare yourself to rewire your mind to receiving the sounds, and to modify the environment to adjust to the sounds you are about to hear.

In this book, I was given a 3 minutes exercise to find a quiet and inactive place to close my eyes and just hear myself breathe in and out. Nothing more. It was not a meditation exercise, as I was instructed to clear my mind and then listen to what thoughts come into my head.

What I learned is: my subconscious mind holds a stream of thoughts that are buried inside me at all times, holding onto what I need to know or what I want to do later, or what I can worried about. These thoughts come back when I silence the active mind and allow those subconscious thoughts to come back and occupy. So reality is, this is all distractions that can bubble up at any point that distract you from listening to what is happening in the moment.

Internal distractions include:

• Time-based: past, present or future
• anticipatory: upcoming conversation, relationship, outcomes or issues
• Connecting thoughts: act like popcorn ricochetting off of each other

Internal distractions are inevitable. Create a reset strategy to return to focus

External distractions include:

Ego is a major distraction to listening. Drifting while listening or fighting the urge to interrupt is a function of your ego. It’s essential to notice your ego’s location and direction, especially how it might hijack your conversation.

Ego is not a bad thing, just something you have to manage. Ego is a vital role in defending and protecting you and your agenda. Ego can seize and misdirect a conversation (make it about yourself)

Ego and empathy are two sides of a shared coin. Noticing your ego’s role in a conversation will help increase your empathy. With your ego adjusted and your empathy present, the speaker relaxes and changes how they communicate.

The deeper you breathe, the deeper you listen.

Electronic devices are distracting. Even typing notes up while listening is distracting.

Strictly repeating back what you heard can be a bad thing, as it may be taking the floor away from the speaker and disrupting their flow in conveying what they wish to say. Active listening is not necessarily putting in words to acknowledgement, as doing that too much is a bad thing.

How well do you notice whether you listen for similarities or for differences? Be flexible, notice you need to explore both approaches at different times in a discussion.

When you open your perspective, you can notice when you are listening for similarities to confirm your POV and help defend your position. Alternatively, when you listen for difference, are you merely creating the start of your argument because of your experience, education or evidence is different? Be choiceful.

Listening for similarities in an unproductive way shows up most when you are listening with sympathy rather than with empathy.

Empathy is the way to connect to the emotion another person is experiencing. It doesn’t require that we have experienced the same situation as they’re going through. Not to be confused with sympathy. Sympathy is I feel bad for you. Empathy is I feel bad with you.

Empathy is an important signal that you’re listening.

Sometimes they’ll be saying something, and then they’ll sigh and they’ll stop, and they’ll give a moment of silence. Then they’ll say what they really want to say.

If you hold a different POV, declare it early rather than wait til the end, when your different perspective can feel like a conversational hand grenade, blowing up what progress they thought they made.

Equally, constantly declaring a repetitive point of difference can be unproductive for the group. Be mindful listening for differences can derail, destabilize, and disorient the group.

When bringing consensus to a group, listen for similarities is essential.

When you are listening for contrast (difference), it becomes much easier to notice when differences emerge in what they are saying and how they are saying it. (like if they are saying something but how they say it doesn’t seem to match what they’re saying).

Implicit Bias in listening can be relational, or contextual. How listener relates to the speaker’s topic or speaker can affect the listening. And if the listener is listening with a different set of context, it can also bias the listening.

Take more notice of where your attention is in the moment. And see if it’s misplaced before resetting it back.

When you pay attention, you feel constrained, restricted and limited. It makes listening feel like a chore or task. Most effective with dealing with well-known situations or relationships, routine matters with predictable patterns.

When you give attenion, it is for emerging and evolving situations. Act of curiosity, generosity, and possibility. When you give your complete attention, you notice what is said and what is unsaid. You notice the connection between what and how they say it. Thisi s all possible because your working memory can attend to listening. Consequently, making it easier to pause and be patient.

Thinking is faster than listening which is faster than speaking.

So 100 words said is a 1000 words listened to is a 10000 words thought of. so notice that underneat words said, there’s alot more thoughts going on. And also notice that when you listen too quickly, you start to anticipate what to say next and that overrides listening to the words and thinking from their perspective.

125/400 rule is no of words per minute speaker communicates vs no of words per minute you can listen to.

Your attention will create the space for everyone to become present, and a speaker wont feel rushed to say their ideas instantly, and make them feel safe to collect and deliver.

Hear: Audio content

See: Facial expression and body language

Sense: emotion present in the speech

Mismatched preferences between speaker’s preferred style and yours will accelerate how quickly you drift away.

What is the most effective location for the conversation? How do I improve the acoustics during the conversation?

Paraphrasing reflects what is said, but be aware how you say it, as paraphrasing is reflection not interpretation. If you are paraphrasing with your interpretation, you can make the speaker feel corrected, judged, or misunderstood.

Avoid interpreting their words, drawing conclusions, only summarizing once, using statements in your paraphrasing, what you meant was, what you just said was…

Instead, summarize in their words, be curious, be consistent, ask, do you mean …?, are you saying…?

Listen with your eyes, be at same eye level. Note body language, not as an expert of it, hard to be. Instead, just notice the disconnect between what they say and how their face looks when they say it.

Be careful when it comes to labelling a speaker’s emotions. If you have not mastered listening to yourself, this could lead to you labeling your feelings as their emotions.

“You sound frustrated” could be counterproductive words, for example. Labeling a person with the emotion carries the different weight. The speaker doesn’t need to carry the burden of your description of their feelings.

Emotion bring energy to conversation. You can use their power to create something compelling.

Choose an environment that matches the energy of the conversation you’re about to have.

Something powerful and transformational happens when a speaker says the entire story out loud from the beginning — from the idea’s inception.

Pause and rewind: ask, when did you notice…? When did the issue commence? Do you mind taking me back to the beginning?

The backstory needs to start at the beginning — very beginning of the issue — not where the speaker commences.

Explore their backstory. Ask, what was that like for you? What did that feel like for you? What were you thinking about at that moment?

The backstory is the critical link between fragments and connections, frustration and understanding, the obscure and the obvious.

How you invite backstory is critical. Try, where would you like to start? The emphasis here is on you, consequently inviting the speaker to expand and explore themselves. Try, could you start from the beginning? Is broader and allows them to think about the issue more comprehensive perspective, implies you want them to begin from the beginning of the story not their story.

When a speaker is stuck, help them notice they are stuck. It can show up as anxiety, frustration, or repetition, excitement or as energy. Notice when the speaker starts to repeat elements of the story.

You role is not to point out their stuck, you role is to help them notice if being stuck or reptitive is productive for them? Ask, Do you notice a pattern?

Don’t label the pattern for the speaker. Being stuck and staying in a place with no progress is simultaneously comfortable and uncomfortable. Rather than attempting to emerge or progress, understand what is helpful whilst pausing.

Remembering listening subjective, You subjectivity makes you human. You are never an objective observer in their story. Your presence in a discussion will change the speaker’s awareness of the issue and viewpoint, whether you choose to say anything or not.

Adjectives are signposts for language. How somebody describes something tells you the vintage point of the speaker and where they are coming from, even subconsciously conveying what they may think of the discussion being had.

Pronouns are important to. They signal the orientation where the perspective is being conveyed from.

Self Orientation: Me, I, mine

Other Orientation: they, them, team

System Orientation: Organization, us, community

When you notice how people speak, rather than only what they say, you get a sense of how they express themselves — their unique communication fingerprint.

When you notice a pattern or a preference in a speaker’s words, you job as listener is not to label it or judge how they express it, your job is to help the speaker notice this pattern. Let them use their own label so they make progress in the way that makes sense for them. Positive or negative preferences convey this.

Absolute or relative preferences also show the inside thinking of the speaker. The more absolute terms used, the more emphatic they may be. Words like: always, never, all none, every, strictly, true, false, unique, precise, identical, necessary, unconditional.

When you understand the foundations of their thinking, you better understand how they make sense of their reality and how it will influence their future.

Meaning emerges in the silence between the words.

Their complete thoughts are not in their first explanation. Speaking is the like the rinse cycle for the mind. It comes out all jumbled and out of time, place, and order. Quickly condensed and compiled. It is likely just the tip of the iceberg, there’s more to unpack.

When a speaker draws a deep breath, pauses, sighs, breathes, you hear things said like: actually…, also…, maybe…, now that I think about it…, what I actually want to say is…, the most important thing is…, funny enough…, interestingly enough…, what matters the most to me is…; these are moments the speaker gathers themselves to tell you more deeply.

Treat silence like a complete word: listen to the beginning, the middle, and the end of their pause. Listening to their breathing offers an early warning sign about what is coming rather than what has just been said.

The curiosity to pause and ensure shared understanding will surface and what is unspoken.

To get elaboration, rather than jump on their thoughts, let there be a longer pause, so that the speaker may begin again. Say things like: ‘what else?’, ‘and…’, ‘tell me more…’, ‘…’; can bring things out. Silent and listen share identical letters.

The speaker creates their meaning when they link the past and the future. If you as the listener can allow space to let them link these things, you gain a greater understanding of where the source of the words come from. What things mean to others.

when you listen for meaning, opposing and diametric ideas and views can coexist and cooperate.

Be mindful of who the speaker is, the world of a child, for example, can vastly differ than an adult. Lower your body to line your eye level, see things from their viewpoint, explore what they are saying by letting them explain themselves further.