Confidence in your podcast series – Listening with Confidence
EM: Hello there, and welcome to the next edition of our podcast Confidence in Your Pocket. I’m here today again with my very good friend, Jane Adshead-Grant, and we’re going to be talking about confidence when it comes to listening. So let me start, first of all, by introducing myself very briefly. I’m Eilidh, Eilidh Milnes. I’m known as the speaker for confidence, and essentially I help you when confidence issues strike, so whatever it is it may be, if you have a loss of confidence, I’m here to help. Now let me hand you over to Jane who will tell you a little bit about herself.
JAG: Hi Eilidh, love to be back with you again and welcome to all of our listeners. My name is Jane Adshead-Grant and I work with individuals and their teams to achieve more for themselves through facilitating their independent think so they can think with courage, with imagination, with rigour and with grace.
EM: Ok Jane, here is question one. Tell me, what’s your background when it came to listening and developing this tremendous skill that you have, because I have to say, you’re one of the best listeners I know.
JAG: Well thank you Eilidh. For me, my background in listening, where I became interested, having retrained as a coach some 15 years ago, I the programs as we develop our coaching skills, listening is a key element, but it developed further from my fascination in language, in how I love to listen to individuals for a number of things, and then I suppose for me, the real difference in developing the listening that you so kindly appreciate with me now is when I met Nancy Klein and the world of ‘time to think’ and particular the thinking environment and this is at the time when my listening, I believe, went to a different level and so that would be my background as to why I’m really interested and work with others to support their listening to a greater level.
EM: It’s always great, isn’t it, when we come across another expert who just raises our game and we think, “Oh my goodness!”? So I hope that’s what we can do with this podcast to help people realise that they can very easily, if they think about it, raise their own skills.
Going from that thought, what three tips would you give our listeners if they were trying to improve their own particular listening skills?
JAG: Well, I guess the first thing for me is, you’ve got to get interested, really interested, in the speaker, and not only interested in what they’re saying but what they’re saying in terms of where the body language is and where they’re going next with their thinking. The other thing that I would suggest in terms of really to develop your listening skills is to be open-minded. I think so many of us understandably with our experience, is that we may well have our own views about a certain situation or subject that the speaker is talking about, which is fine, and yet when we’re really listening to somebody it’s to be able to just hold those views and opinions at the time of listening and engaging and keep them quiet so that we remain open-minded to the possibility of what we might learn from the speaker.
The third thing I would say is to free yourself from distractions. In this crazy world full of distractions both internally, i.e. what our mind is saying and how we might be feeling in response to what we’re listening to, is to quieten that for a moment, such that we can pay attention once more to the speaker and also of course to minimise the distractions around us, whether that be a mobile phone or a television or just allowing people to interrupt, is to really minimise those.
EM: Yes, and what I would add to that, and what you have referred to is that you’re listening to understand, you’re not listening to input your great ideas, you’re just listening to understand what the person has said. So, really what has been your expertise? Why do you think we should see you as the expert in this area?
JAG: Well, I think listening is one of those things that you have to experience and so when you engage with me and what I’ve noticed with my clients and not only my clients, to be fair Eilidh, it’s with my family and friends, one of the things they would say is that they feel that they’ve been listened to like they never have before and when you begin to develop a skill or an expertise, what you begin to hear back in terms of acknowledgement of that is I often hear people say, “You know, now that I’ve had the chance to express that, I think differently,” or sometimes I hear people say, “I’ve never really thought about it like that before until now.” What this demonstrates to me Eilidh is that they’ve had the opportunity to really think for themselves and through my attention, the listening that I’ve given to them.
What I’ve noticed that’s just critical in all of this is resisting the urge to interrupt. So many of us do that and we form a habit and one of the things I find fascinating, I was in the supermarket only the other day and just waiting to take my turn and I was observing some interactions between people, some new each other well, some less well, but constant interruption between the two as they were having this exchange, it was fascinating.
EM: Oh yes, and I was doing some profiling at a training session on Friday and they were working around the tables, and of course I was visiting each table and there was one girl who had a very inspirational and intuitive and very intriguing personality, I have to say, but she couldn’t stop interrupting everybody else, and I said, “That’s a typical profile of a person who is an I. You really are very engaging, but you really have to listen as well,” because when you listen to someone it’s the greatest compliment that you can give them. So can you tell me then, a very good friend of mine in the speaking industry is Allan Pease and he’s written a book called Why Men Can’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps. In your experience, is it true that women are better listeners or men cannot listen or is that just out there, an urban myth?
JAG: That is a great question and I think it is a myth, in fact. I too have written a book on listening and I include this area of myths in there, because so often we fall foul to that and I think the reason why people think that women are better listeners is the fact that we just listen to different things. Quite often we’ll be listening at the emotional level or some of the connections, whereas men tend to listen to the more logical, that fact aspects of conversations and so therefore, when we come to make an observation or when it’s our turn to speak, we may reply with information that’s picked up very different aspects to what the speaker has been speaking about, which is why people assume that women are necessarily better listeners, but the truth is, they’re not. It’s a skill that we can all learn and develop with practice.
EM: And I have to totally agree with you because as someone who speaks for living and does a lot of talking, I am blessed with a husband who listens and he really does listen and it’s amazing how he quotes me back at myself, and I’m thinking, “Wow, he really was listening.” It is a nonsense. I totally agree with you, Jane, that it is a skill that you can learn should you want to. So to close off this podcast and today’s transmission, what would your couple of top tips for the listeners be?
JAG: I would say the first thing is to challenge yourself now, to really ask yourself, “Am I really a good listener?” because I think so often we’re very quick to judge other people and say, “He just doesn’t listen to me,” and yet we overlook our own capacity to listen well. Then I would say, pick a couple of areas, just two small things that you could do differently to enhance your listening.
One of the things that I see so often is this temptation to interrupt, so my top tip would be to notice the times and resist that urge to interrupt and allow the person to complete their thought as they're speaking and the final thing that I’d like to offer is to set a good intention, an intention each and every day that you’re going to spend some time really listening to the person with whom you’re having an interaction with and let them know that they matter.
EM: I think that’s lovely, and perhaps the person will know they’ve taken on your tip if they can remember that when they next engage with someone that they have a little bit of quiet time, that there’s actually a pause between what you say and what I say, which allows the conversations to naturally close and that’s proof perfect that you have been listening. I’m sure the listeners have been listening to you very closely and are going to take on board your tips, so it’s goodbye from me for now, thank you for listening in guys.
JAG: And it’s goodbye from me.
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