Learn How To Listen

Listening is not as simple as it appears. Listening is not just hearing, it’s much more[i]. Listening means understanding other’s point of view in the way someone wants to communicate without any bias or preference or judgment imposed by us. Just pure listening.

Often, we are distracted and full of our own thoughts. So many thoughts may be playing in the back of our mind that it may not be possible for us to actually listen carefully. Something which happened in the morning e.g. improper sleep or an argument with someone on the road can hamper our inner peace without which we can’t listen and understand other’s point of view.

We may also start evaluating the other person as soon as the communication starts. We may unconsciously start our faculty of discrimination and get into the mode of selecting some and rejecting other of what’s coming from the other person.

Is he right? Is he saying something which I have heard earlier also? Can he be trusted? No, he is wrong. No, I don’t like it. Yes, this one is right. Yes, No, Yes, No – All these kinds of emotions and related thoughts start cropping up.

Our receptivity may get influenced by our past impressions. Last time he said something else and now he is different. He appeared fat last time. The other person in my society also looks and talk similar to him. He argued last time. That was bad. This way, one part of our mind may remain continuously involved in evaluating other person and passing judgments.

As we said earlier, listening is an art and it requires lots of practice to build the perfect listening skill involving empathy, attentiveness and being absolutely non-judgmental. One of the best examples of listening is the way a Shishya listens to a Guru as the word “Upanishad” describes.

Upa means by and Ni-shad mean sit down. Thus, the word Upanishad means to sit down near the teacher to receive the knowledge. Its metaphorical and it essentially means to be receptive such that the knowledge come down and enters smoothly into your wisdom.

When we get into our business, listening is one of the fundamental skills we have to develop so that we can connect with our customers, suppliers and influencers effectively and utilize each moment of time and attention for the purpose of understanding properly.

In the language of communication, this skill is called “Active Listening” to give it right context and differentiate it with passive listening which we have to overcome, in case we are habituated to it so far. You can search for Active Listening on internet and will find the right resources, articles and exercises to develop it. In this chapter, we have covered it in our context and suggest you to practice it regularly.

In nutshell, Active Listening means following[ii] –

Being 100% present in the conversation with full attention & eye contact and no distraction from any of the senses
Noticing (and using) not just verbal but also non-verbal cues as many times the other person may not be able to quickly find the right words to express him so you need to allow him to open up by giving the right comfort
Asking open-ended questions to encourage further responses and avoiding Yes or No type questions which actually don’t allow the discussion to develop
Listening to understand with no urge to interrupt or respond. This urge has to be consciously controlled and put on hold. Develop the sense of acceptance even if there is no agreement.
Consciously withholding judgment and advice. You’ll need to train yourself in not being judgmental and assigning right or wrong tags on others. Simply, observe others the way they are first. Please note that a non-judgmental attitude doesn’t mean one must agree with what the speaker is saying, it just acknowledges and respects the speakers’ perspective.
Paraphrasing and reflecting back what has been said as it helps in memorizing as well as confirming what’s said. It also helps other person feel that you have understood his point of view or at least you are trying to understand it.
Once the communication is built, start taking notes in bullet points as it’s not easy to remember everything.
Be responsive. Summarize & provide feedback at the end of the conversation using your notes and memory if it is a business-related communication because often, it would produce some action items with owners and timelines.

You might be thinking how to achieve all this! 4 steps are critical to develop good listening skill –

Decide to be a good listener
Develop strong self-observation and monitor yourself
Practice

The first and top most requirement is to decide that yes, I am going to be a good listener and will give my 100% to it. That affirmation or Sankalp will kick off the journey. Note it down on a piece of paper in present sense as “I am a good listener” and stick it on your personal wall.

Second step is to develop self-observation or mindfulness such that you can observe your own behavior as a third person and see where you are going, right vs wrong. There are many methods to develop self-observation. Pranayam & Vipassana are really helpful for this objective.

Once self-observation is initiated, you should start communicating such that your active listening skill improves. Observe everyday whether your communication is on right desired track or not.

We are suggesting a few exercises here for you however you are free to add more to this based upon your own preferences.

Exercises

Pranayama[iii]

Pranayama (Prana = Life Energy, Ayama = Expansion) helps in expanding our life energy and in turn, that improves the level of our self-awareness, the most critical foundation to develop active listening skills.

We can listen to others only when we are peaceful deep inside, have good concentration and stop listening to the noise generated by our mind. All these are positive outcome of prolonged practice of Pranayama, an important part of the overall yoga system.

Some of the well-known and easy to practice pranayama are Bhastrika, KapalBhati, Ujjayi, AnulomVilom, Bhramari and Pranav (Aumkar Chanting). You can refer to the videos of Swami Ramdev[iv] available on internet for exact description.

Vipassana[v]

Vipassana is a wonderful technique of 10 days duration in which one learns how to observe oneself at physical, emotional and mental levels.

All participants attending the Vipassana course have to observe “noble silence” — that is, silence of body, speech and mind. They agree to refrain from communicating with their co-meditators.

Vipassana teaches you to be aware and equanimous, that is, balanced, despite all the ups and downs of life.

You can get more information about Vipassana at its website https://www.dhamma.org/

Understand Non-Verbal Cues[vi]

With this exercise we can increase the awareness of non-verbal cues and understand that our assumptions of the meaning of non-verbal cues may be wrong sometimes.

This is a team activity. For this activity, each participant should create a list of non-verbal cues that listeners often display.

After that, each player should act out one of the behaviors they identified while the other players should decipher the meaning.

While one person displays a nonverbal behavior, everyone else should write down what message is being conveyed.

The non-verbal cues can be from this list to begin with –

Yawning
Looking around the room
Nodding
Leaning forward in their chair
Leaning back in their chair
A facial expression that suggests intense, serious or a light-hearted presence of mind
A facial expression that suggests an emotion
Look at their watch
Resting your face in one hand
Rubbing your temples
Tapping your fingers on a table
Checking your phone
An animated or subdued gesture that suggests an emotion such as boredom, happiness, anxiety, confusion, anger, surprise, fear, disgust or other emotions

After each round, the participants should share how each nonverbal cue made them feel.

Then we should explore how a nonverbal cue could communicate a message even stronger than words.

The participants should share their past experiences of how nonverbal cues have impacted their communication.

Listen Without Interrupting[vii]

This simple exercise makes us understand how the urge to interrupt with your own comments can be quelled.

Additionally, it also trains us to shift us from our internal dialogue and distracted focus to the speaker and what they’re telling us.

We need to give a topic of choice to our volunteer speaker and let him speak for 5 minutes approx. The place should be a peaceful one without any distraction.

All the other participants should listen to the speaker, without interrupting or interjecting. Do not make any notes. Observe the speaker with full attention and at the end of the talk, share with him about the key takeaways, the main themes, what matters most to the speaker.

Do this exercise multiple times to develop silence based listening skills and develop control over inner dialogues.

[i]https://virtualspeech.com/blog/active-listening-skills-examples-and-exercises

Active Listening

[ii]https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-active-listening-3024343

Active Listening

[iii]https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-active-listening-3024343

About Pranayama

[iv]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuW-SzuQfLg&t=2s

Pranayama Video

[v]https://www.dhamma.org/en/about/vipassana

About Vipassana

[vi]https://www.developgoodhabits.com/active-listening-exercises/