The ability to listen well requires active engagement – your brain is not only taking in facts or information, but interpreting and organizing it in relation to past experience and knowledge to hypothesize and problem solve creatively. How might that look in relation to an everyday business deal?Interestingly, financial writer William Devine shares that a client asked him to negotiate the purchase of some land. Trouble was the person's offer was $100,000 below asking price. Mr. Devine stayed on the phone a long time with the owner and resolved most problems, but the owner returned to the money issue and declared, "The price your client proposes will leave us well short of our projections. That makes it very tough on us."
During a pause, Devine reflected on his alternatives. Since the developer hadn't asked a question or made a counteroffer, Devine waited. Finally the owner proposed, "…it's good for us to just get the deal done, so we'll do it." Devine declared, "I had saved a client $100,000 by simply immobilizing my jaw." Mr. Devine made a great choice because he was not merely focusing on his own agenda here, but listened actively to make a choice. Would you have listened and allowed silence? Would you term yourself an engaged, active listener?
Try this listening quiz to see where you stand. List A, B or C as shown below to answer.
A = less than 20% B = 21 – 59% C = 60% or more
- Do you think about other things when someone is speaking? _____
- Do you “tune out and turn off” a speaker when you are not interested? _____
- Are you easily distracted when someone else is talking? _____
- Do you quickly begin developing arguments in your mind if someone presents ideas opposite to your beliefs? _____
- Do you plan what you want to say as someone else speaks so your voice can be heard at the first possible pause? _____
- Are you uncomfortable with silence when no one speaks for a couple of minutes? _____
- Do you allow “catch phrases” to destroy your focus? _____
- Do you mainly listen for facts and jot them down rather than formulating bigger ideas? _____
- Do you look away from a speaker’s eyes during a conversation? _____
- Do you listen more easily to recreational topics than ideas that challenge your mind? _____
Eight or more A responses and B responses: you are a good listener, but you can target areas to improve.
Mostly B responses [4-7] with some A responses: you are not truly an active listener and you can benefit at work by rewiring your brain by using new active listening strategies.
Some C [1-3] responses, plus [4-6] B responses: you can benefit by purposefully engaging in active listening on the job beginning today.
What do recent discoveries about the brain reveal about our ability to listen? Our ability to listen well is affected by multi-tasking, distractions, and our ability to construct a “play-back loop” for a message.
According to UCLA psychologist Russell Poldrack, “Tasks that require more attention…will be particularly adversely affected by multi-tasking.”
Insightfully, Poldrack found the brain's hippocampus plays critical roles in processing, storing and recalling information. For the task learned without distraction, the hippocampus was involved. However, for the task learned with the distraction of beeps, the hippocampus was not involved; but the striatum was. The brain’s striatum underlies our ability to learn new skills.
"Multi-tasking makes it more likely you will rely on the striatum to learn," Poldrack said. "Our study indicates that multi-tasking changes the way people learn."
These researchers suggest that you should avoid multi-tasking when trying to learn something new that you hope to remember. Do you sense multitasking affects your attentive listening ability?
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University show that your brain is forced to process messages as you listen which requires much more from your working memory. Ellen Weber describes working memory as, “your mental capacity to hold onto a few different facts while you noodle them to solve a problem or to create something new…”
To scientists' surprise, there were two big differences in brain activity patterns while participants were reading or listening to identical sentences, especially at the level of understanding meaning. During reading, the right-brain was not as active, which opens the possibility that there were differences in the nature of the comprehension you experience in reading versus listening.
Second, while listening was taking place, there was more activation in the left-brain region that usually activates when there is language processing which requires recall. The greater amount of activation in the left brain suggests that there is more language processing and working memory storage in listening comprehension than in reading.
“Because spoken language is so temporary, each sound hanging in the air for a fraction of a second, the brain is forced to immediately process or store the various parts of a spoken sentence in order to be able to mentally glue them back together in a conceptual frame that makes sense… to re-play spoken language, you need a mental play-back loop” according to Marcel Just, Carnegie Mellon psychologist.
Leaders in a boardroom often think fast on their feet, process information and communicate ideas based not only on written reports in a meeting, but even more crucially, their ability to listen actively.
Tips to rewire your brain for active listening:
- Probe with questions to take speaker "deeper." What are you curious about?
- Detect tone and purpose. What’s in it for the speaker?
- Focus on key points so you can repeat them later
- Jot down key words quickly
- Wait before judging what speaker says. Consider speaker’s approach first.
- Read and outline main points from articles with “complex” ideas to learn how to process many-sided issues when you're a listener.
- Do not be distracted by hot or politically incorrect words
- Keep your eyes on the speaker as you use a receptive body stance
- Consider content and not delivery bumbling
- Mentally summarize and form a picture of the whole
- Value silence at times
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