Active Listening

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>> Francesca Sadikin: So we just covered the story of how I learned active listening. Just a few takeaways here from this story, as a reminder, creating connections with others is not just for extroverts. Even those with social anxiety can develop this skill, and it is that, it is a skill.

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You gotta remember to start with genuine intent, an intent to understand the other person. Authenticity is crucial for building trust. And active listening is just a skill to help you foster this connection by making the other person feel heard and understood. So let me actually cover a little bit more in detail what is active listening.

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I actually really like this description by Harvard Business Review, so I'm gonna read it loud. What exactly is a active listening? You might think you are a good listener because you put away distractions, stay quiet, and then nod your head when someone's talking to you. You might even repeat back your conversation partner's main points to demonstrate that you've heard and absorbed them.

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These are all smart things to do, but they can still leave the speaker feeling unheard or even dismissed. So active listening is when you not only hear what someone is saying but also attune to their thoughts and feelings. It turns a conversation into an active, noncompetitive two-way interaction.

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Robin Abrahams and Boris Groysberg from Harvard Business School describes active listening as having three aspects. Cognitive, so mentally we are paying attention to all of the information, what someone is explicitly and implicitly saying, comprehending, just trying to build that picture in our head. Emotionally, we're trying to stay calm and compassionate during the conversation.

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Filtering out emotions such as annoyance, boredom, judgment, about what they're saying, you wanna filter all of that out. Behavioral, so in your body and your facial expressions, you're going to be conveying interest and comprehension, verbally and non-verbally. So body cues, and then also through our words we're saying, yes, we want to hear more, we want to understand.

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Some other little tips that I have, again, important, make the other person feel heard and understood. That is the entire point of using active listening.
>> Francesca Sadikin: People will not share anything if they don't feel like they can trust you or if there is not a safe place for them to share, right?

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And so to do that, we have to make sure that we are, again, filtering out our inner feelings of judgment, shame, or blame. People can sense it immediately, and they're gonna clam up immediately.
>> Francesca Sadikin: I've also noticed that a lot of conversations kind of bucket into three categories, what, why, and emotions.

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So when we're talking about conversations that try to create a connection, what in this diagram is like the air? There's nothing of substance there, we want to move away from those types of questions quickly and move into why, which is a little bit more. And then the big bulk of it is the emotions.

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This is where connection is formed, when we actually start to share how we feel.
>> Francesca Sadikin: So two active listening tactics out of many that I'm gonna share with you is mirroring and labeling emotions. So remember, again, active listening is a way for you to demonstrate your desire to hear the other person's experience, creating space for the other person to share more.

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So mirroring achieves that by giving them a verbal cue that we'd love to hear more. So for example, I said, I'm worried about my presentation for the board meeting. And my friend could say, what about the presentation is worrying you? So that is actually a clue for me, it's like, she wants to hear more, let me share more, right?

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Labeling emotions, so like my previous diagram, we want to get to the emotions as quickly as possible cuz that's the interesting part. And one of the easiest ways to do that is by labeling the emotions of the other person, one, to see if you did actually understand what it is that they're feeling.

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And two, it prompts them to continue sharing more, if they feel comfortable. So for example, they just wouldn't listen, even though brought it up so many times. And I could say, did that feel really frustrating? My friend can say, exactly, it was frustrating because blah, right? You can see that these types of questions is a way to prompt for more.