We all know that Communication is a key skill in our professional environment.
And we often think that communicating is about talking and convincing. And we forget that a very important part of Communication is Conscious Listening.
You've probably heard about Active Listening. And you've probably thought about the need to improve your listening skills. I'm going to suggest a higher level of Active Listening: Conscious Listening.
What is Conscious Listening?
As the photograph shows, we need to activate 2 senses: sight and hearing.
Freeze your thoughts and just listen to what the person in front of you is saying. The only thing that matters is the person in front of you. Concentrate and give them 100% of your attention.
If you have ever meditated, you know that we should let our thoughts pass. It is difficult because we unconsciously focus on developing the thought. No! Erase it from your mind, push it away, let it pass and stay focused on your interlocutor.
How do we practice Conscious Listening?
In the next posts I will share with you practices to improve our Conscious Listening. Because we know the theory well and we also know that we can only improve by “training”.
I propose an exercise:
In the next conversation you have with a single person (client, coworker, friend, partner...), focus on looking and listening to the person: 50% of your energy in the sense of sight and 50% in the sense of hearing.
Our goal is to achieve full connection with our interlocutor, to give them full mental prominence, to focus on their words, their gestures, their glances, their pauses, their breathing. We cease to exist and only our interlocutor exists, who is speaking to us and sharing their ideas.
How to achieve this Conscious Listening?
3 steps that can help you:
- Look into your interlocutor's eyes, look at their hands, look at their facial expression, look at their posture, look at their gestures. Interpret what they are communicating to you with their visual language: are they showing joy, pride, peace, satisfaction or worry, anxiety, anger, disappointment...?
- Listen to their tone of voice, their speed, their volume, their pauses, their fillers, their cadence, their breathing: can you decipher what emotion their voice is communicating? Is this emotion aligned with everything you’ve sensed through their body language?
- Analyze through his words what his message and his objective are: is your interlocutor really waiting for your opinion, does he just need to vent or is he informing you?
I can guess what you're thinking right now: is there anyone in the world who consciously listens by following these 3 steps? The answer is yes! And you can be next.
When we follow these 3 steps, we don't have time to develop our own thoughts, we are not constructing the response to what we are hearing, we are not allowing our mind to "hijack" our listening. Simply put, we are focused on our interlocutor, on "Listening with sight and hearing"
When are you going to start practicing Conscious Listening?
