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Glenn Mattson
Well, welcome back to the Building Blocks of Success. Season two, we're on Episode 11, we're gonna be talking about active listening. Active listening is this crazy thing that everyone talks about that very few people understand. Yet when we take a look at listening, and we've all been there in these stories, where you ask somebody, how are you doing? They answer it, you took value in the words they use, but you didn't hear the tone in which they said it. Maybe a call home and yet I've done it say to my wife on the way back from work or a trip, you know, so how's everyone doing? And she'll turn around, so it's just great. And I'll hear it as the word is doing great when the reality was that was sarcasm.
Glenn Mattson
So active listening is giving us the ability to understand words, tones in body language, when we communicate. So when we look at active listening, and it's a thing that has a lot of different areas to go in, and different things that we can talk about. But active listening is really a very powerful process. And what it does is it involves really concentrating and understanding what the speaker is saying to you, both verbally and non-verbally. And to do this, we have to do it without interrupting and without judgment. Let me give us the again, active listening is a communication skill that involves you fully concentrating and understanding on what someone is saying both verbally and nonverbal, that's their tone and their body language, without interrupting them and without having judgment. Meaning that you can't take past histories, or what other would look like this person or others that sounded like this person or others that would use these words like this person. Therefore, they must be. That's judgment, we have to leave all that to the side.
Glenn Mattson
So active listening is really, really important on many different fronts. The first piece, which is really important is it builds an enormous amount of trust, and a strong relationship with the person you're talking to. We're going to talk about why in a second and how, but it builds trust, it builds relationships, it builds the fact that you understand them. Super, super big.
Glenn Mattson
The second thing that active listening does is it really helps you prevent any misunderstandings or conflicts. Look the majority of the problems that we have with other human beings were created by humans and more times than not they can be fixed by humans. So preventing misunderstanding and conflict is just getting on the same page.
Glenn Mattson
The third issue or outcome, really important about active listening, is it can really lead to a better outcome, a better decision, and how to get to the outcome between the two people that you're talking to. One being yourself. By taking time to truly understand someone's point of view, from someone's perspectives, it gives us the ability to move quickly into a decision-making process. So active listening will help dramatically when it comes to personal and professional skill sets.
Glenn Mattson
So what the heck is active listening? Where did it come from? Many people will tell you the active listening is really about three basic things. And this is really important to learn and understand, especially if you're newer in the career, or you're in someone who's in sales or service that you're trying to build and grow relationships, which is pretty much everything in your personal professional life, I would hope. But here it is three basic premises of active listening. So when we look at active listening, one of the things that we have to take a look at as these basically golden rules when it comes to active listening. Here's the first one. The people want to be understood. They want to be listened to. And that's really important because listening, being listened to, and being understood is different. So people want to be heard, right, they want to be listened to. And they want to have the respect of being listened to.
Glenn Mattson
The second things are when you really look at people as a whole people have feelings and some of these feelings, they're aware of, and some of these feelings they're not aware of. And they're truly not aware of other people's feelings sometimes. So active listening, again, believes that people want to be heard, and they want to be understood. Two different things, being heard is that someone's actually listening and being heard, is really where someone's paying attention and they're understanding you. So when you're listening and hearing two different things, you got to understand what they're saying. But you also have to listen to what they say. And if they're telling you 'a' and all you're doing is fighting against 'a' you're not listening. If they're telling you 'a' and you're fighting on the fact that they're wrong, you're not understanding why they're coming from a perception of 'a,' doesn't mean you have to agree with their perception, but you got to listen to it and at least understand their perspective. Doesn't mean you agree, but you can understand their perspective.
Glenn Mattson
That's a huge piece, we really look at the majority of fighting and the majority of the reasons that we continue to fight and we continue to have disagreements, is because more times than not we are just restating the same factual information that we were trying to say in the beginning, but no one's listening to us, they're not understanding us.
Glenn Mattson
The other premise that's really important is we all have feelings. And these feelings we could be aware of, and some of these feelings we may not be aware of. What happens if someone says something to you, and you say, oh, my gosh, here we go again, this is like the 15th time. I don't even know why put up with us, I don't even know why I keep asking and you just go off the reservation in terms of they just said 'a' and you're taking 'a' interpreting it into being something completely different, or you may be accurate. But the person you're talking to isn't aware of those feelings that you're discussing. And we'll talk more about that in a second.
Glenn Mattson
The other piece is that people sometimes have feelings they want to hide. So when we look at the past, that's feelings of sadness, when we look at the things in the future, that's either motivation or anxiety. And that's again, a feeling that we have not a bad feeling or good feeling anxiety is just its feelings. And frustration is a feeling that we have with people and where we have a processes and feelings of frustration is normal. That frustration turning into anger is something that we can fix with active listening.
Glenn Mattson
So what the heck is active listening? Yeah, we understand that people want to be heard, we want to be understood and if you really think back at the last two or three disagreements you had with someone that you care about, more times than not what creates a bigger wave, a bigger problem than what you're talking about is the fact that you're not understanding them. Or you don't have to agree, just understand. So when we look at communication, there's really two modes of communicating. It's writing or talking. And your writing is you get to read. And the talking is you get to listen.
Glenn Mattson
When listening is way more than just hearing. Listening, is what are you doing? And what are you receiving? When people send information, they send it to us, and really three different levels that we can receive it in. We can hear the words, we can see their body language, and we can feel their tone. So we have three different ways of receiving information. I mean, look, this is how it works. You have a sender, and you have a receiver. A sender has a message in their brain that they want to send out. That message does not go directly from your brain to their brain, doesn't work that way. A sender has a message, that message goes through what's called a personal box. And that box is all the things that's happening in their life at that moment. They could be hungry, they could be tired, they could have a bad night, the kids could have been up all night, they could have just lost a sale. You don't know what happened in their life up to that point. So they have all these things that occur. And these things will have an impact on the message they're sending. So again, a sender has a message, whatever that is. It goes through their box, their box is how they feel, how they feel about where they are, how they feel about the environment that they're in, how they feel about the conversation they need to have right now, how they feel about a person like you in this scenario. It goes through their filter. Then it goes all over, and you get it and when you get this message, it goes through your filter box. How are you feeling? How are you feeling in terms of sleep and hunger and where's your patience level and what happened to you during the day also? So now that message was super clean, goes through their filter box goes out, goes into your filter box, and then goes up into your brain. By the time it gets there, it's like playing telephone tag with three people in between you.
Glenn Mattson
So more times than not what the receiver sent out and what we got as a message, historically is not the same. So what active listening is, it's bridging that gap between you and the sender on what the message was. So think about it in your head. You have two stick figures, your left hand is the sender, your right hand is the receiver. Your left hand says here's the message I want to send, but it goes from your tip of your finger down to your wrist and that wrist represents the filter box: how they're feeling, how they're doing, how they perceive where they are, their interpretation of what the meetings about, why they need to be in the meeting, all that goes through there. Are they hungry, not hungry? So the message goes through that filter box, then it goes over to your right wrist, the right wrist is the receiver, the receiver has a filter box and their wrist also, and how they're feeling what's going on in their life. Then the message goes from your wrist all the way up to the tip of your index finger. And that's where your brain is, and that's what you receive.
Glenn Mattson
So ultimately, wouldn't it be nice if we could do tip of our fingers to tip of our finger? Right and just have ability to just send, you know, wavelengths through the air to someone else so they can understand what we're thinking. That's just not how it works. So what active listening does is when that receiver gets the information through their filter box, they send it back to the receiver and say, in essence, this is what I got, this is what I received. This is what I heard. Is this accurate? And by doing so, it really makes a huge difference on the sender and the receiver. So to have the ability to send it back, really files just a couple of processes.
Glenn Mattson
The first is you really have to listen; you have to listen on what they say. You have to listen on how they're saying it and you have to listen on what their meaning, very different. So the first step is listen. The second step is acknowledge. Acknowledge the fact that you heard what they said. And that could be moving your head up and down. That could be nodding, that could be a smile. That could be a grunt, acknowledging that you actually are pacing what they're saying.
Glenn Mattson
The third step, give feedback. We're going to talk about that in a second. And then the last is search for emotional content. Now, feedback, let's talk about that. So someone turns around and says, hey, how was your day? And someone says back to you, man, I had a great day. So you turn and you smile; acknowledgement. Feedback is my gosh, it sounds like you had a killer day. And they would turn around, say, absolutely. And you said, so my gosh, that's exciting what happened? I added no content to that dialogue. But the person I'm talking to felt like we are super engaged.
Glenn Mattson
So when we look at this, there are different feedbacks we can give. So let's talk about some simple things first, and then maybe later on, we'll do more elaborate things. In the beginning, active listening, is giving back what's called parroting. And parroting is exactly what you think it may sound like. A parrot doesn't do anything but give back exactly what they heard. So if you say goodbye to a parrot 600 times, the parrot can learn how to say goodbye. So parroting is a form of active listening. So how was your day? It was pretty good. You nod your head for acknowledgement and say parroting is, so it sounds like it was pretty good. All it is is giving back exactly what they told you in a sentence. It sounds like what you said is, so what you're saying is, so it sounds like your day was. That's parroting, giving back exactly what they said. And it works really well.
Glenn Mattson
Now the other is called paraphrasing. Paraphrasing is giving back what you thought they meant by what they said. And that's not listening to the words necessarily. That's more interpreting the tone in which they're using, the speed in which they're talking, the volume in which the talking. Do they have anger in their voice? How is your day? Yeah, great. Paraphrasing would be, really sounds like it was a nightmare. So now what I'm doing is I'm interpreting feelings. I'm interpreting what their intention of what they said, not the words of what they said. There's a very powerful process of doing that. So think back, when people are talking to listen to the words, that's really important. When you get pretty good at listening to words, now start listening to the volume and the tone in which they say. The volume in your tone are typically about 80% of your communication. Words are only about 16% if you're on the telephone, if you're face to face, your words are only about 7%. Your physiology is 55% of your ability to create trust, and so much messages and how your body looks. So if I'm sitting there, and I said to someone, so how was your day, and they look at me and they move their chair from left to right, and they shift their body and move their weight around with their elbows on top of the, you know, the armrests, and they're moving their body around and, they turn around they look at the ground kind of sheepish and say it was fine.
Glenn Mattson
You have to pick up not the words in which they say, the words meant nothing, you must pick up the clues of the body language. The body language tells you everything. So remember, words are 7%. Your tone, the words you use, the speed in which you talk is typically right around that 35 38%. So you're looking at 45% of your ability to create information through the words you're using your body language, more than half in the tone that you use more than half has to do with your body language. So 45% is words and tone. 55% is your body language. So realize that when you're observing someone speaking, look at what they're doing with their body and start to interpret their feelings. Like I remember, one of our tasks to learn active listening was to watch a TV show without any noise, right? Turn off the volume, just watch their body language, watch what they do, watch how they act. And if they're good actors, you can, should be able to get their feelings. Go to a restaurant, watch two people talk, you know, if they hear anything, they're saying, just watching from afar, watch their body language, watch how one person's face changes or doesn't change when the other person's speaking to them. Watch about how their hands are moving. Are they engaged? Are they not engaged? Do you realize that subconsciously, when we're engaged with somebody, we sit like them, we move like them. If we're engaged with them, and they're walking down the hallway, we will walk the same speed they are, we're not engaged, we will walk faster. So our body language is there.
Glenn Mattson
So when you look at active listening team, you got to have the ability to be thoughtful, and hearing what someone's saying. So many people would say, and I can't tell you this is accurate or not. Many people would say that active listening really came to fruition for marriage counseling for men. So having the ability to pay attention and use active listening at home with your children, with your spouses, with your friends, with your colleagues at work is huge. You turn around you say to someone so when do you think we can get that email out? And they turn around say, look, I'll get it done within the hour. You can turn around, say, look, I appreciate that, man, it sounds like you're just at your wit's end what's going on? That's being empathetic. That's being someone who cares about the person that's speaking.
Glenn Mattson
So when you're using active listening, remember, people have feelings, they have feelings, they want to share their feelings that they may not want to share. Those feelings are based on a situation that happened before you. And it could be because of some of the things that you're doing, i.e., maybe you're going to commit to do something, and you didn't do it and the person that you're committing to has history on people making commitments and not following through with it. So they put you in the same bucket as everybody else that was going to do that. And if their reaction doesn't fit the crime, you've got to do some active listening. So active listening is stating what you think they're feeling. Active listening is stating what you think their body language means and then they can confirm it. So active listening is something that we teach, that you should utilize probably every third to fourth question that you use within your toolkit. If you're at home, and you walk in and you say to someone, maybe they're coming home from work, maybe you're coming home from work, maybe you're both coming home from work. How was your day?
Glenn Mattson
Man, why would you ask the question if you don't want to hear the answer? If you ask the question, you don't pay attention, they know you're not paying attention. And they know that the question was just a question to ask as you were supposed to, and you don't care. So active listening does show that you care. It does show that it will reduce stress, it improves communication, it's massive on self-awareness. It's huge in empathy. But if you're in the world of sales, you're in the world of management, active listening is something, you should be using every third to fourth thing out of your mouth. Even if you're going down and you're having a dialogue, you could still always sum up a paragraph that sounds like what we just talked about is, sounds like your perception of the things we just talked about was. And you're reconfirming what they said.
Glenn Mattson
Remember, two modes of communication, writing and talking. And listening is way more than just hearing, you got to pick up what they say, how they say it, and how their body looks when they do it. So hopefully, this will give you some tips on how to improve your active listening. You got to come up with some things in your back pocket that you can utilize. Things like so what you're saying is, what I heard you say was, interesting. So it sounds like, I get the feeling that. To make sure we're both on the same page it sounds like what you're telling me is. I don't want to make sure I didn't miss anything. So let me do a quick recap. Sounds like in the last minute we talked about. Some of those are summaries, some of those definitely are going to be active listening. When you go home, or tonight, talk to an individual within your close circle of friends or within your family, and do active listening.
Glenn Mattson
Next session, we're going to talk about how to improve your listening skills, which will improve your active listening skills. So enjoy this technique and the Building Blocks of Success. Someone gave you two ears in one mouth. Try those ratios for a while. And active listening will improve your ability to trust, improve your ability to hear people and more importantly, improve your ability to understand people. Please remember this. Everyone wants to be heard. Everyone wants to be understood. It doesn't mean you have to agree with me. Active listening is one of the greatest techniques to help you understand and have other people believe you hear them, which you did. It's a great technique to master. And the nice thing is, you don't need to put a lot of energy and effort into it if you're truly listening. And that's the art of it. Try active listening, get really good at it. Try it with your spouse's, try it with people at work. Try it with everyone you possibly can to master the skill sets. And all you're doing is again giving back what they heard. Giving back what you thought they meant to say and giving back feelings of what they were saying. Sounds like what you said was; what I heard was; I got a feeling what you meant was. My gosh, so it sounds like your day was. So you're connecting words, feelings and actions and tones. Enjoy this technique called active listening, moving forward and utilize it to help yourself with your building blocks of success.
Glenn Mattson
This is the Building Blocks of Success with Glenn Mattson.
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