I’ve talked a bit about the power of reflecting listening and why we listen, but have not talked much about how to listen. Let me remedy that.

First, though, the difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is the physical act of listening; hearing begins the moment the auditory signal enters the ear and ends when the brain receives the notification that a sound has been heard.

Listening involves “interpreting and understanding the significance” of what you heard.

Listening involves twelve skills:

• Attending Skills
  • A posture of involvement
  • Appropriate Body Motion
  • Eye Contact
  • Non-distracting environment
• Following Skills
  • Door openers
  • Minimal encourages
  • Infrequent Questions
  • Attentive Silence
• Reflecting Skills
  • Paraphrasing
  • Relfecting Feelings
  • Reflecting Meanings
  • Summative Reflections

Seems daunting. Fortunately, you already know most of the skills—at least, you know about most of the skills. If you’re like most people, you’re not actively nurturing them. Most of us spent much of our childhood learning how to speak and not much time learning how to listen. (The most I got from my parents and teachers was “Pay attention!” But what does it mean to “pay attention”?)

Over the next few days, I’ll review each of the listening skills. If you’re really anxious to learn about listening, you can purchase People Skills by Robert Bolton, which is where I learned my listening techniques, and where much (if not all) of this information comes from.

I picked up a gem of a book this weekend called Everyday Speech: How to say what you mean by Bess Sondel. It was published in 1950 and has some interesting insights into the art of speaking (both public and one-to-one) and listening.

I haven’t finished reading the book, but wanted to share some of its insights on listening.

Listening is active and involves three operations.

1. We listen to understand. If we don’t understand, we cannot proceed intelligently to the next two operations. When do we understand? Only when we can sum up in ONE sentence (or less) what the other fellow is driving at…

I would add that to fully understand the speaker’s meaning, you must not only understand what he says, but also the emotions behind the words. And you do this through reflective listening; once you have accurately reflected the speaker’s meaning, you can then move on to the second and third parts of listening, which are

2. We listen in order to judge.

3. We listen to make use of the material.

My favorite quote from his discussion on listening:

Listen for controlling ideas, but remember ideas are conveyed by words. Don’t slide over words—even familiar words. The meaning of a word must be found in its context.

And, again, reflective listening comes into play here. By paraphrasing the speaker’s words, you ensure that your understanding of the words and the speaker’s understanding of their words are in-line.

Pick up the book. It’s well worth the $1.00 cost.

There’s been a lot of talk on the blogosphere about Getting Things Done, a book by David Allen that describes a process for, well, getting things done. Now, I’m still working to integrate GTD into my daily life, but one tool that has made this whole process easier has been reflective listening.

Reflective listening is the act of paraphrasing a speaker’s emotions and words. It’s a tool you can use to make sure you have understood the speaker’s meaning, and gives the speaker an opportunity to clarify any misunderstandings.

So, why is this useful for GTD? When done well, you mirror the speaker’s meaning, giving them a chance to hear what they just said—and by hearing it, they’ll think about it and make sure what they said was correct. If it’s not exactly what they meant, they clarify. The process continues until you are both on the same page. Once you start reflectively listening, you’ll find that the work you’re getting done is more accurate because it is based on the actual requirements instead of on mistaken assumptions.

The best book that I’ve read on the topic is People Skills by Robert Bolton.

Reflective listening is not a panacea, but using it gives you a better chance at getting the real requirements. I’ve used reflective listening to clarify client and coworker assumptions. Without it, my suggested solution to their problem would not have addressed the real problem.

What’s more, when you reflectively listen to others, you communicate that you have heard them and are actively engaged in the conversation—even if you initially misunderstand their meaning.

One caveat here, though, I have met a few people who were just annoyed by the whole act of reflective listening. It’s usually because I’m doing it poorly. If done well, reflective listening should be a natural part of the conversation, and, well, I’m still learning how to do that.

More often than not, though, I’ve found reflective listening to be a vital tool in my GTD toolbox—even when I’m doing it poorly.r! If they had only heard what they had asked for, they would have realized that what they thought they wanted wasn’t actually what they wanted.