Practical Developmental Ideas July 2003
This issue is about listening. Listening
is one the most valuable, rare and underrated social skill there is. We need
more of it, especially in troubled times.
"I think she/he needs a good listening to!",don't
we all?
When someone listens to you well, and you feel very
safe, you start to express the thoughts and feelings that are inside you. Your thinking
becomes clearer and more powerful and you feel energised because someone has
shown you that you are worth listening. So, you are valuable.
When you listen to someone else, as well as helping that
person, you also start to understand what he or she needs and what
makes her or him tick. This will make them much easier to work with in any role
or setting. Effective listening is essential for effective communication.
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How
to have more listening in organisations?
Problems
The really
difficult things about listening well are not technical. Sitting still,
paying attention, giving warm eye contact, asking good questions, not
interrupting or talking about yourself are not difficult in the sense of
requiring years of study. If you "watch people", you will notice
very young women, particularly, taking turns doing this effortlessly and
with evident enjoyment for hours on end.
The
difficult thing about listening is to decide to do it and to give up,
temporarily, what most of us want to do a lot, which is to talk! This need
can be so strong that we interrupt, compete, switch off, jump to conclusions,
finish people's sentences as we rush to speak. When we do the other people are
also doing the same so dialogue becomes very difficult. This is much worse
when people have strong feelings or raise thoughts that challenge our
way of thinking.
Solutions
One
way time
Consultants,
coaches, mentors, counsellors are all in effect selling their time and
attention and offering one-way listening to another person in exchange
for money or another reward. This can be very helpful, especially for senior
people who find it hard to be open inside their organisation or to be seen not
to know the answers. It is useful in career and other crises where people are
preoccupied with their own situation and feelings and need outside support and
challenge and have nothing left to give anyone else.
In it's
purest form, one-way time can sometimes leave the person with the issue (the
client) feeling a bit low. He or she may imagine that their helper has no
problems or issues and that their life is perfect. I prefer to let my
client know a bit more about me than that when working this way.
In
organisations, one way time is easy, acceptable and rather expensive. It is not
a very efficient way to pass on listening skills to people.
Two
way time
In its
simplest form, people take turns listening to each other for perhaps half an
hour each way. This simple process will help both parties think more
clearly and act more powerfully. It also has some advantages over one way time.
It is very easy to build in feedback so, after each half session the person in
the client role tells the helper what she or he did that was helpful and how
the helper could be more effective next time. You can discuss client skills
too, if you like. Thus, learning and improvement is built into the
process. People get closer and more able to trust each other as both
parties start to open up to each other.
There are
many ways, see coconsulting
and cocounselling, you can use this simple
process to improve communication and commitment. It is an excellent way to get
helping and listening skills embedded into the organisation. I have been
surprised how helpful people find to talk to their colleagues, when their
colleagues are concentrating awarely on listening. They might get further with
a counsellor with twenty years experience but they do get a long way with a
colleague on a course.
I once
asked a group of people to talk, in pairs, about a real problem for ten
minutes to a colleague. I asked him or her to listen, with delight, but
not say anything. Astonishingly, more than half of the group reported they had
made real progress with their issue!
Working
in groups
I referred
to the "go round" in June's
issue. This is a very nice way to increase the amount of listening in the
organisation too. There is more in Nancy
Kline's book. Very busy organisations seem to find organising the sessions
a bit difficult. I have a friend who does a lot with "Action
Learning", which uses similar methods, in the public sector.
How
to increase you own ability to listen, if you wish?
My
experience suggests that learning techniques will help a bit. It does help to
know how to reflect back, summarise and ask open questions. You may find
feedback from people you listen to and seeing yourself on CCTV helpful
too. However, nothing is as useful as being a client where you have time to
be listened to. This is the only way of shifting the feelings from your
life experiences that otherwise get in the way of hearing what other people are
saying.
For
example, some years ago I was working with a couple but wasn't making
any progress with the man. He was very successful at work and was having
an affair with his secretary. It was only when I talked to my
counsellor that I realised I was jealous as hell, I was having a bad time at
work and we had just had our first child.
I get
listened to very regularly in two-way settings. This is very
effective and only costs time and travelling.
Feedback please
So, I hope you have found this information interesting
and in a useable form. The subjects I might cover in the next
issues are : -
Developing your people
Eliminating unnecessary work
Improving working relationships
Stimulating creative thinking
Thinking tools and processes
Influencing skills
Are these important to you?
I am sure there are many ways to make this more useful to you. Please let me know what you think of it, if you have time. If you have any particular developmental interests you would like me to cover, please let me know. I will try and respond if I can and if I don't know anything about the subject, I will tell you.
Commercial
I spend quite a lot of my client contact time working one to one. People often use this time to think out loud. They are functioning perfectly well but when they are both supported and challenged, their thinking and their determination both go up a gear. One of the reasons this goes well is because I have regular sessions myself. So I am always stretching and learning and never forget what it is like to be a client. People sometimes think that being listened to warmly and with attention and being asked to think is "easy". It is not, when it works it is sometimes stretching and uncomfortable but the benefits of new insights can be huge, even life changing.
I also work with people in career or personal crisis and those requiring coaching to learn new skills, like presentation or influencing.
I have done some work to help people learn how to help each other through listening to each other and would love to do some more.
If you want to follow anything up, or have an exploratory conversation, please give me a call or e-mail.
You will find information about my work, background and lots of free resources on my website http://homepage.ntlworld.com/nick.heap/ .
Using these materials
I am entirely happy for you to use
or draw on any these materials in any way you think will be helpful. I am keen
to have my work, and the work of the people I have learned from, used.
If you can, do you think you could
say where you found them? One way might be to give a link back to the site
or to my email address. This will
help these positive ideas to spread, and help my business, too.
Best wishes,
Nick Heap
43 Roe Green Close
Hatfield
Herts AL10 9PD
UK
01707
886553 and mailto:nick.heap@ntlworld.com
Web, with
many useful resources: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/nick.heap
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