When I was working as an accounting clerk in my late teens, if someone came to my desk to talk to me I would continue to work on whatever I was doing. Because I always heard what they were saying I thought I was being very efficient; multi-tasking almost a decade before IBM coined the word in the mid-60s.Then one day I learned my first important listening lesson.
A colleague was telling me about a problem she thought I could help her with. I continued to post numbers in a ledger while she explained her situation. Suddenly, she shouted, “You’re not listening!” I told her I had been listening and thought I’d redeemed myself by accurately describing her problem. She retorted, “But your eyes weren’t listening.” Of course, she was right; as far as she was concerned I’d been just a part-time listener.
Good listening means giving people our undivided attention. If we aren’t looking the speaker right in the eye we’ll make the same impression I did on my co-worker many years ago. Because the other person’s true emotional state isn’t always accurately conveyed by words alone, we also need to pay attention to body language, facial expression and tone of voice. And it’s even more important to maintain eye contact when speaking with someone in a crowd. Even if it isn’t the case, wandering eyes send a message that we’re looking for someone else to talk to.
Listening is often all we have to do to be considered a good conversationalist. As a head table guest at a business dinner, I happened to be seated at the end of the table so I had only the woman on my right to talk to. She was the after-dinner speaker’s wife, and although I knew her husband quite well I hadn’t met her before. She dominated our conversation throughout the meal. Yet, when I ran into her husband a few days later he told me what a wonderful conversationalist his wife thought I was. All I had done was listen attentively to what she had to say.
The unfortunate truth is that many people wouldn’t listen at all if they didn’t think it was their turn next. As a result, they commit the most egregious listening sin, which is to be thinking about what they’re going to say rather than paying attention to what is being said to them. Good listening needs our undivided attention. Don’t be thinking about what you’re going to say when it’s your turn; listen instead to understand exactly what the other person is saying.
We also shouldn’t tune out people simply because there’s something about them we don’t like. Listen to everyone; everyone has ideas, and ideas are sometimes more valuable than money. If you and I exchange twenty-dollar bills, we each still have only twenty dollars. But if we exchange ideas, we will each have two ideas to think about.
And no matter how tempting it might be, interrupting people is not only rude but is apt to be counter-productive; they may be leaving their main point until the end of what they have to say.
Good listeners aren’t just popular; they learn things. When we’re talking we can only repeat what we already know, but when we’re listening we learn what other people know.