Now we’re down to the most difficult group of listening skills: Reflecting skills. Reflecting skills are the key skills required to be a master listener. With Following Skills and Attending Skills alone, you’ll be good, but you may still misunderstand or misinterpret the speaker. Bolton offers these thoughts on reflective listening:

In a reflective response, the listener restates the feelings and/or content of what the speaker has communicated and does so in a way that demonstrates understanding and acceptance.

There are four reflecting skills:

• A paraphrase is “a concise response to the speaker which states the essence of the other’s content in the listener’s own words.” When I talk to folks about the virtues of reflective listening, this is often what they think about, but it doesn’t stop here.

• Reflecting feelings “involves mirroring back to the speaker, in a succinct statement, the emotions which she is communicating.” You can deduce the speaker’s feelings by

  • observing body language
  • listening to their tone
  • listening to the type of feeling words they use
  • putting yourself in their shoes

  By non-judgmentally reflecting the speaker’s feelings, you encourage them to talk more freely and openly, which helps create an instant intimacy with the person. Further, in order to fully understand the content, we must understand the emotions surrounding the content.

• Reflecting meaning is simply reflecting both the speakers content and emotion.

  When we respond to the speaker’s meanings—the feelings that paralyze or motivate and the content to which the feelings are associated—our listening is often most effective.

  When first learning how to reflect meaning, try using the formula: “You feel…because…” For example: “You feel angry because that jerk cut you off in traffic.” You might think that saying something like: “You feel…because…” would come across as silly or condescending, but it doesn’t. People focus on the fact that you actually understood them rather than the actual words you used to communicate that understanding.

• Summative reflections are restatements of the over-all themes and feelings of a conversation.

  Summaries are useful in any number of situations, and are most effective “when the listener (1) gathers together points that the speaker brought up, and (2) selects relevant data—that which will help the speaker more clearly understand key elements of her situation.” A good summary, then, empowers the speaker to “speak in more depth” about the topic.

  Bolton gives a great example of how helpful summative reflections can be:

  Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychotherapist, told a colleague about his first visit with Sigmund Freud in the year 1907. Jung had much that he wanted to talk about with Freud, and he spoke with intense animation for three whole hours. Finally Freud interrupted him and, to Jung’s astonishment, proceeded to group the content of Jung’s monologue into several precise categories that enabled them to spend their remaining hours together in a more profitable give and take.

So, there you have it. A summary of the three sets of skills needed to become an effective listener. I’ve only scratched the surface here, and would strongly recommend that you pickup Bolton’s excellent book People Skills to learn more about effective listening.

Other posts on How to listen:

• How to listen: Following skills
• How to listen: Attending Skills
• How to listen

---

I’m certainly no expert on listening. Most of the ideas and all of the quotes come from an amazing book by Robert Bolton: People Skills. IMO, it is the greatest book on how to apply listening skills in your everyday life.

Rosa’s at it again. And, as usual, she’s hitting the nail on the head.

She’s posting more about the Daily Five Minutes. This time it’s a two part series. Today’s part focuses on the D5M from the employee’s perspective; the second part will focus on the boss’s perspective.

Now I’ve been remiss in actually telling you why I think the Daily Five is such a good idea. There are two reasons:

The first has to do with the core purpose of the Daily Five:

When your boss Takes 5 with you, the basic coaching they get from me is that the agenda for the D5M is yours, not theirs (hence Lucy’s question). They are supposed to come to you with nothing but an eagerness to talk to you, ready for some practice on being a better listener when you talk to them — about whatever you want to talk to them about.

That the employee has the opportunity to be heard and, more importantly, be understood is the key part of the Daily Five Minutes. Being understood is key, because it’s what we, as humans, really want. If your boss shows up for a Daily Five and doesn’t actively listen to you, she’s doing more damage than if she had just ignored you all day long.

Keith Ferrazzi writes a little about this in his column in inc magazine. Master Networkers, he says, can quickly create an intimacy with other folks by “allowing people to go deep into themselves”—that is, we can intimately connect with others by engaging them in an open conversation about the things that they are passionate. What’s more, this openness and intimacy are rewarded.

In this same way, a boss that takes the time to talk to her employees in a non-judgemental fashion about things the employee is passionate will be rewarded with hard-work and loyalty.

The second is a bit more practical in nature: it allows the employee and boss to connect without taking a lot of time, which gives the employee (and boss, for that matter) more time to get work done.

Anyway, quit reading my words and go read some of Rosa’s. Great stuff.

Unlike the attending skills I previously discussed, following Skills require more practice to master. They might look familiar, but putting them into practice will take some work. At their core, Following Skills are the activities that you do (and don’t do) to encourage the speaker to, well, speak without getting in their way. In fact, according to Bolton:

One of the primary tasks of a listener is to stay out of the other’s way so the listener can discover how the speaker views his situation.

Unfortunately, listeners don’t always get out of the way. They often ask too many questions, or their questions divert the conversation in directions the speaker didn’t want to go. How many times have you wanted to talk about something, but your listener started asking questions about things that were only peripherally related to your topic?

Following skills include:

• Door Openers. Per Bolton, a door opener is “a noncoercive invitation to talk.” Sometimes it’s as simple as “What’s on your mind?” or “You don’t seem yourself lately.” According to Bolton, door openers have four parts, though not each part is present in every door opener:

  1. Description of the other person’s body language
  2. An invitation to talk or to continue talking
  3. Silence; that is, give the person a chance to respond.
  4. Attending. (All the skills I talked about here.)

  Keep these guidelines in mind when “opening the door on a conversation”:

  1. Do not use roadblocks when you should be using a door opener. More on roadblocks later. For now, know that roadblocks are comments that actually dissuade a person from talking instead of encouraging them to talk.
  2. If the person doesn’t want to talk, don’t force the issue.
  3. Only use door openers when you have time to commit to the conversation. Giving the person an opportunity to talk and then cutting them short will make it that much difficult for them to open up later.
• Minimal Encourages. These are “brief indicators to the other person that you are with them”. They are minimal because the speaker says very little, but they encourage the speaker to continue talking because they communicate that you are interested and are following them. Minimal encourages include nodding your head, saying “mm-hmm”, or offering other short phrases.

• Infrequent Questions. Questions can either help draw the speaker out, or they can direct the conversation away from the real issue the speaker wants to discuss. Using infrequent questions “helps you better understand the speaker without directing the conversation”. However, most people, myself included, ask too many questions. If you find yourself down the rabbit howl of asking too many questions, try turning your next question into a statement; as Bolton says:

  …most questions can be expressed as statements and that doing so generally is far more productive in a conversation than repeated questioning.

• Attentive Silence. One of the best quotes from Bolton’s book starts out his section on Attentive Silence:

  The beginning listener needs to learn the value of silence in freeing the speaker to think, feel, and express himself. “The beginning of wisdom is silence,” said a Hebrew sage. “The second stage is listening.”

  Many of my friends and co-workers are uncomfortable with silence. Any pause I might give to my conversation is often filled with the other person’s voice. Bolton likens these people to the character in Waiting for Godot who said: “Let us try to converse calmly since we are incapable of keeping silent.”

  During silence pauses in a conversation, a good listener does the following:

  1. Attends.
  2. Observes facial expressions, posture, gestures; hears what the speaker’s body is saying.
  3. Thinks about what the other person is communicating, reflecting on both the speaker’s message as well his emotions.

  Like the other following skills, silence can be taken to extremes as well: Too much silence communicates disinterest.

Unlike attending skills, which you probably already knew how to use, following skills will take time to master. Be patient. I’ve been practicing these skills for the past 2 years and am still learning. Don’t let that intimidate you, though. I’ve been talking for nearly 30 years and have become quite proficient at it—just ask my wife! But I’ve only been listening—really listening—for 2 years. You wouldn’t expect a toddler to speak in complete sentences, would you? The important thing is to keep trying, keep practicing. Even as a growing novice, you will see a marked improvement in your conversations and even in the core of your relationships.

---

I’m certainly no expert on listening. Most of the ideas and all of the quotes come from an amazing book by Robert Bolton: People Skills. IMO, it is the greatest book on how to apply listening skills in your everyday life.

Never correct others in social conversation. That they’re wrong doesn’t matter, and correcting them only puts them on the defensive, effectively shutting down the conversation.

Not sure where I learned this. Maybe Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People?

---

Update: This principle isn’t from Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. At least, I couldn’t find it in there—either by skimming the book or searching on Amazon’s “Search Inside”. Maybe the idea is my own or comes from some other book.