Have you noticed that most of the training we need is about what we already know, but don’t do enough of? That’s certainly the case with listening skills. We all know how important listening is, but we all fall short of the level we’re capable of.
The interesting thing about listening skill is that we all can perform at top levels when we’re really, really motivated, so it’s not a question of knowing what to do; it’s about executing at the necessary level consistently.
If you think you’re a good listener, here’s some listening math to ponder:
| 50/25/10 | A study showed that the average person remembers only 50% of what was said immediately after a 10 minute oral presentation. After 24 hours, the figure drops to 25%, and to 10% after a week. The first 50% is not a memory problem, it’s a listening problem, as anyone knows who hears a person’s name for the first time and “forgets” it ten seconds later.
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| 500/125 | In standard American spoken English, we speak at about 125 words per minute, but process words mentally at about 500 words per minute. I’m not sure how scientific the thinking speed measurement is, but it’s obvious that we can think much faster than others can speak. That’s why it’s so easy to get distracted while listening to someone else. We think we can listen and think about something else at the same time, but we’re actually rapidly switching back and forth – except when we forget to switch back.
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| 583 | The number of people killed when two 747s collided at Tenerife airport in 1977, caused primarily by a chain of listening errors and misunderstandings between pilots and air traffic control, and between pilots and copilots.
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| 80/45 | Those of us in business spend up to 80% of our waking hours in communicating almost half (45%) of our communication efforts consist of listening. There’s a lot of effectiveness left on the table if we’re not listening to our full potential.
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| 43,8 | The average length of a political sound bite on national news in 1968, and the average length in 1988. CBS News tried to counter this trend by mandating a minimum 30-second sound bite, but had to abandon the effort when people would not listen.
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| 18 | “That’s the average time it takes a doctor to interrupt you as you’re describing your symptoms. By that point, he/she has in mind what the answer is, and that answer is probably right about 80% of the time.” Jerome Groopman, How Doctors Think
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| N = 1 | One of the reasons that doctors (and possibly ourselves) tune out is that we think we’ve heard it all before. Maybe the other person needs advice with a problem, and it’s something we’re familiar with. Every conversation has a sample size of 1, because every person feels themselves unique, and maybe if we listen a little longer we may learn something new ourselves.
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| 51+ | This is a number I made up. 51+ represents the minimum level of responsibility you should take for your side of the conversation. When listening, don’t just passively take in the other’s words; meet them more than halfway and make sure you get their meaning. When talking, don’t assume that they got it just because you said it, make sure.
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In this rushed and distracted time, prescription there seems to be more and more incentive to get results fast, solve problems, cut to the chase, and multi-task. We scan headlines, give continuous partial attention, consume sound bites, and then hurry on to the next shiny object, because we think it makes us more productive. In fact, most of you probably won’t finish reading this post – and you’re the ones who need it the most!
Is it possible that all this speeding up is just slowing us down? Or, medicine looking at it from the other side, can slowing down actually get us where we want to go faster?
That’s the idea behind the motto: Festina Lente, which means “make haste slowly”. In this series of articles, we’ll explore how old-fashioned patience can make us better communicators.
Patience is a personal quality; it’s a state of mind; it’s a habit, and – most importantly – it’s a skill that you can develop (over time). The good news about the skill of patience is that it’s scalable. You can get results in terms of improved learning, relationships, and persuasion from slowing down by less than a second, just as you can all the way up to the level of months or even years. I know you don’t have the patience to read through the entire scale, so we’ll start small in this article, and move up the time scale from there in other articles.
When Seconds Count
When someone else is speaking, do the spaces between their words sometimes seem interminably long? Do you begin formulating your response to the other person before they even finish their sentence? That’s because you can think much faster than they can speak. Although that sounds like an advantage, the problem is that after you begin thinking about your response, you are now listening to a different conversation, and you tune out of theirs; maybe you even interrupt. Either way, the price of impatience is missed information or making the other person feel slighted.
Cultivate the habit of listening fully and intently to the other person, focusing on the words and the non-verbals; try to extract every gram of meaning that you can. Don’t worry about not having enough time to compose a response, because the speed of your thinking will give you plenty of time to do so when it is your turn to speak.
Probably the most valuable split second in persuasive communication is the space between the other person finishing their sentence and you opening your mouth to speak, because that’s when you either react or choose to respond. Unlike Jeopardy, you don’t get points for speed of response. In fact, pausing even for less than a second can help you tremendously. It gives you time to formulate a more thoughtful response; if the conversation is difficult or emotional it gives you time choose your response; it makes you look more thoughtful. In addition, because so many people have what Tom Wolfe called information compulsion, they may have an overwhelming need to fill that small moment with additional information.
The third opportunity to use patience on the seconds time scale is during your presentations and speeches. Some of the most eloquent and powerful moments in speeches are the pauses. I’ve seen too many people deliver a major point – and then ruin the effect by rushing on to their next point before the audience has had a chance to take it in. Small pauses will seem long to you as the speaker, but they will appear natural to your listeners and make you come across as confident and in control.
If you want to work on developing patience, these small split-second intervals are a great place to start. Work on these ideas for the next couple of days, and then we’ll move up the scale to minutes, and after that, focus on strategic patience, or the days, weeks and months.
You should have no trouble figuring out what he’s saying
One of the favorite statistics cited by communication “experts” is that only 7% of the meaning from spoken communications comes from the actual words spoken. As the story goes, 55% comes from facial expression, and 38% comes from body language, tone of voice, etc.
It has been around ever since Albert Mehrabian cited those statistics in a book entitled Silent Messages, published in 1971.
These experts use it to stress the importance of paying attention to non-verbal signals, whether you are the listener or the speaker. It’s a good statistic to cite because it’s appropriately surprising and it lends an air of science and precision.
The problem with the statistics cited is that it’s mostly false; in my own very unscientific estimate, it’s probably about, oh, let’s say 7% true.
If it were actually true, then when I was in Italy last week, I should have had no problem understanding 93% of what the taxi drivers told me (I didn’t). Plus, I could save a ton of money not buying headphones to watch airplane movies. If it were actually true, then listening to an educational podcast or talking on the phone garners you less than half of the message. And of course, you probably would not be able to understand this article unless I filled it with emoticons, which I refuse to do. It’s so patently untrue that when I read or hear that from someone, I automatically disqualify them as a credible source.[1]
But most people aren’t that simplistic. Some who cite the study come closer to the truth by qualifying it to the part of the message that contains feelings and attitudes. And that definitely makes sense in a lot of communications. If I ask someone how their meeting went, and they answer “great”, I can instantly tell whether they are sincere or sarcastic. In that situation, 0% of the message came from the actual meaning of the word; they could have answered me in Swahili and I would have understood.
But of course it gets more ambiguous as messages get longer, and it definitely does not apply when the speaker is deliberately trying not to show their true feelings. It also does not apply when someone is explaining factual or technical information. If I ask someone for directions, their facial expressions won’t make much difference in my understanding.
So, what did Mehrabian actually measure, and what did he say? Three female speakers were recorded saying one word, “maybe” in either a like, neutral or dislike tone of voice, and then 17 subjects listened to the recordings and were asked to infer what the attitude of the speaker was to a third party to whom they were presumably speaking. A follow-up study was then done with 30 subjects, using nine different words grouped according to the same three attitudes, and the results of both studies were combined to arrive at the statistics cited.
It’s fascinating to me that a study using 10 total words, 47 subjects, conducted in 1967, is still so influential today. As my friends on Sports Center would say, “C’Mon, Man!” (and you can imagine my tone of voice as I say it).
[1] Note: I do not mean to imply any disrespect to Mehrabian or his study, just to people who try to sound scientific without checking their facts.
Even positive qualities can be overdone
Three of the best qualities a persuasive communicator can have are passion, goal focus and a problem-solving orientation. But these positive qualities can actually get in the way of effective listening if they’re overdone.
Passion: Passion is great; it can be contagious and we can be more believable when we let the listener see how much we care about the topic. But everything carries a cost, and passion for your idea can easily turn into arrogance and missed opportunity. The reality is that no one else is passionate about your pet project as you are, and they will ultimately agree for their own reasons—not yours.
The other problem with passion is that you just don’t shut up. You have to tone down the passion long enough to listen to the other’s point of view. You will have plenty of time to dial the passion back up when you go into transmit mode, so squelch it while you’re in receiving mode.
Dial down the passion and dial up the empathy.
Problem-solving: We love to solve problems for others; and that’s a good thing. But we have to tone it down during the listening phase. Rushing in too early with a solution can create problems for you. First, you may be wrong; you may solve the wrong problem, or provide an incomplete solution because you don’t have enough information to understand it completely. Second, even if the answer is exactly right, your credibility may suffer if the other person gets the sense that that’s what you were going to say no matter what.
If you want your solution to land on willing ears, slow down, ask a few more questions to either dig deeper into causes or to bring out the costs of not solving, and–best of all—to let the other person arrive at the solution and make it their own.
Dial down the rush to solve and dial up the patience.
Goal focus: It’s great to have a specific goal in mind for a presentation, sales call, or conversation. But being too focused on your goal is like driving down a busy highway only looking at what’s in the lane in front of you. It’s called inattentional blindness, and it’s illustrated by the now-famous “invisible gorilla” video and Richard Wiseman’s research into what makes some people luckier than others. Similarly, we want to ask excellent questions, but sometimes we’re so focused on the answer we’re looking for that we miss other important information.
By all means, keep your goals and your questions, but use them as a safety net rather than a straitjacket. By getting them out of your head and putting them on paper, you can focus your full attention on your counterpart, knowing that your written goals and questions will be there if and when you need them.
Dial down the searchlight and dial up the floodlight.
