5 Steps to Real Improved Listening (or Why You Were Tricked Out By Your Last Listening Course)

5 Steps to Real Improved Listening (or Why You Were Tricked Out By Your Last Listening Course)

Admit it. You’ve read the articles that give you the ten or so points of how to listen better. Maybe you’ve even sat through a course or two that was intended to drill home the tenets of fine listening. Maybe you even got enthusiastic about being a superior listener and thought you had this thing nailed.

Unfortunately, here you are today and you’re still being berated for jumping to conclusions, chided for interrupting, scolded for finishing somebody else’s sentence, and generally, admonished for not listening, period.

Here’s the dilemma: you don’t know what to do because you are doing exactly the things to listen better, exactly as provided by the articles you’ve read and the courses you’ve attended. You really have this thing nailed!

The issue! Unfortunately, you don’t. Fortunately, it’s not your fault…yet.
The three things that prevent us from being superior listeners – leadership-quality listening wonders, mavens of listening excellence – are our deference to our emotional triggers and filtering, our attitude about listening in general, and our facility at remaining tied to both.

Chief among these is our deference to our emotional triggers and filtering. In many listening articles and courses, we are urged to “be open”, “not to interrupt”, “encourage others to speak”, and the list goes on. My personal favorite is, “don’t judge”. If we don’t judge, we’re told, we will become effective listeners. What!

Here’s the issue: most of us do not know how to listen without judging, and we cannot listen and judge at the same time.

The fact is we are not being told or shown how to effectively do the things that are suppose to transform us into an individuals of quality listening ability. We are simply being told to do them. Well, I’d like to be financially independent.
However, being told that I need to be nice to all living creatures, have respect for my elders, and upgrade my karma is not going to ensure my goal of financial independence. That’s effectively what’s going on with those listening courses and articles. Effectively, nothing.

Understanding and managing our emotional triggers and filtering will provide us with the foundation for becoming superior listeners. Why? Because with this knowledge we can give ourselves the opportunity to stop compromising our listening ability by judging at the wrong time. In our case, the wrong time is when we should be attending.

The Solution.

Here we go.

Emotional triggers and filtering, and our almost automaton devotion to them, are single-handedly the key reasons why we tend to be listening-depraved.

Emotional filtering is the change in our willingness to pay attention to the speaker as a result of our affective interpretation of the speaker’s words, phrasing, or non-verbal expression.

Emotional triggers are the attitudes, beliefs, and psychological associations and interpretations that we, individually, have acquired and kept since childhood right through to this very minute. (They are our affective interpretation of the speaker’s words, phrasing, or nonverbal expression.)

We judge the speaker’s expression, and sometimes, even the speaker, based on how we manage our emotional filtering process, which is directly proportional to how we manage our emotional triggers.

Once we wade, knowingly or not, into the judgment pool during conversation, we have effectively shunted our ability to sincerely “be open”, “question”, “maintain eye contact”, “encourage others to speak”, “don’t interrupt”, etc., and, of course, “don’t judge”. In other words, we have shut down our ability to implement the tenets of superior listening because we have violated the “don’t judge” rule, which directly influences how well we implement the other tenets.

There you have it.

Now for a reality check. Not to wax Heidi here, but we tend to judge. People tend to judge. It’s a shortcoming of the human condition. Live with it. Understand it. Embrace it. Shake it loose. Let it fall.

The best way to shake it loose and let it fall during conversations occurs in two steps: 1). identify our emotional triggers and understand our emotional filtering process; 2). manage them both so they stop making listening Neanderthals of us.

To identify our emotional triggers, we first ask ourselves what words, expressions, and acts cause us to become excited. Secondly, we explain to ourselves why the word, expression, or act causes us to become excited.

To understand our emotional filtering process, we replay a few of our last conversations and figure out the words, expression, and acts that made us stop listening to the speaker.

How? Here we go.

My emotional triggers are the words, “everybody” and “nobody”. Why? Because my view of the world is that “everybody” and “nobody” have ever done anything because they don't exist, and anybody who thinks otherwise is not telling me the truth. (The emotional trigger here is that somebody is not telling me the truth when trying to make me understand anything about “everyone” and “nobody”!)

Let’s take this further into how this impacts my emotional filtering process.

An example of a phrase that can place a Vulcan death-grip on my ability to pay attention is if the speaker says something like, “I’m honest with everybody.” Why? Because as soon as I hear that, my emotional trigger kicks in, directing my emotional filtering process. In rapid succession things three things occur: 1) my association with the word "everybody" gains focus; 2) my attention shifts from the conversation to the speaker who is now trying to make me believe something that simply cannot be true; and 3) my effort to defend myself against the speaker’s arrant and aggressive attempt to control my very mind becomes my number one purpose for existing at the moment!

And, without managing my emotional filtering process, my emotional trigger tricks me out of a listening opportunity in three easy pieces. Before realizing it, I have sprinted out of the DMZ and am now engaged in full assault combat maneuvers with the speaker! Now I am interrupting, finishing sentences, and, generally, behaving like a mutant listener changeling.

Master versus Slave, or How to implement the solution to poor listening

The issue is not our emotional filtering process; it is how well we manage that process during conversations. Why? So that we can “listen without judgment”, “be open”, “encourage others to speak”, “not interrupt”, and so on and so on.

As long as we are reacting to our emotional filtering process, we are not directing it. We are overriding our success at listening and probably a lot of other opportunities that we can’t possibly see because we’re reacting like a worker-bee, instead of directing like a leader.

How do we stop being kidnapped by our emotional filtering? How do we start to enact the sage instruction for significantly improved listening ability?

STEP #1: Acknowledge that we have emotional triggers.

No worries. We all have something. It isn’t new or unique. (If you have no emotional triggers, that’s new and unique, and probably worthy of your own reality TV show.)

STEP #2: Identify our emotional triggers.

The easiest way to identify our emotional triggers is to observe ourselves while we’re listening to somebody else. As soon as we change our willingness to pay attention to the speaker, we have just elevated our emotional trigger ahead of our emotional filtering management.

Find a comfortable spot to reflect on the conversations of the day. Make a list, mentally or physically, of what you reacted to and why.

Why is this important? Because we can’t manage our emotional filtering unless we know what our emotional triggers are. In other words, we can’t make a game plan for listening better until we know what we’re working with. What we’re working with when it comes to being a superior listener are our emotional triggers. (These things are land mines to listening ability, and they are the key inputs to our emotional filtering process.)

STEP #3: Manage our emotional triggers out of our emotional filtering process during conversations.

This is the heart of a how we actually implement the tenets of superior listening. We have acknowledged and identified our emotional triggers in the first two steps. Now, we want to do a major nip and tuck. We want to nip them the bud and tuck them out of sight during conversations with others.
This is the way we take direct and manage our emotional filtering process.

Here’s how:

The nip. During conversations, when we feel ourselves becoming agitated and the speaker’s words start to sound like “wah wha-waht waah wahh” or something close to that, that’s when to do a quick examination of what’s going on with us. Our goal is to pinpoint the word, phrase, or expression that now has our attending wandering away from the speaker.

The tuck. Since we really are the masters of our emotional triggers and the architects of our emotion filtering, we have dominion over both at all times. Take control of this thing that bothers us by directing it away from the conversation and our focus. In this way, we manage this word or phrase out of our emotional filtering process. We effectively ignore it.

STEP #4: Accept and embrace the fact that listening is much more important than speaking.

Do you know that we spend 80% of our day in situations in which we are required to listen in order to:

• Make decisions
• Take instruction
• Provide input or feedback

That makes listening our most daily used communication skill.

Therefore, it is more important to listen than to speak.

STEP #5: Make managing our emotion filtering process a habit, not a novelty.

Implement these five steps all day, every day. In the beginning you may slip more times than you’re comfortable with, but keep at it.

If you don’t do this, then your poor listening skills will be your fault!

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