The Art and Craft of Listening
“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply” - Stephen Covey. As a world, we focus more on how to speak than how to listen. It happens all around us. In this rapid-paced environment of multitasking and electronic communication, we’ve either forgotten - or never really learned - how to properly listen.
Decades ago, before the invention of the television, there was radio. Whole families gathered around the radio and listened intently to what was being said so as not to miss a single detail. Today, we communicate so often without even seeing the other person, we’re not even present – in more ways than one!
Most of us think we listen just fine. It’s just listening after all. We all do it every day, right? We do, and yet, we don’t all do it at the right level for the situation in which we are the listener. Listening is a complex skill. There is nuance and complexity to the craft of listening. To really listen to someone requires curiosity, focus, and conscious intentionality. Done properly, it creates empathy, learning, and reflective understanding.
Leaders, trainers, consultants, and experts have de-personalized and codified what we just ‘do’ as humans…and called it Active Listening. We all tend to know the bullet point steps of what constitutes ‘active listening’ – the difficult part is remembering to adopt them. Rather than overly focus on those again, we introduced another perspective to help understand how we choose to listen – introducing the three levels of listening. These are about being consciously aware of where we put our attention when we listen:
Level 1: Internal Listening, where we focus on ourselves, our experience, and our opinions as they relate to what’s being said. Or just our completely unrelated internal ‘chatter’.
Level 2: Focused Listening, where we listen fully to the other person. Our own thoughts don’t enter into the conversation, but curiosity can.
Level 3: Global Listening, where we listen to what isn’t being said; body language, the inflections and tone of voice, pauses, and hesitations.
All three of these levels have value in different ways. The skill – the expertise in this craft – is to be always aware of what level you are at, be conscious of what level would best suit the situation you are in, and be intentional about shifting behavior and focus to choose that level, in any moment.