Listen with the intent to understand

Communication; a sensitive topic I’ve brought up previously on this blog. It can cause so much pain and misunderstanding; personally, professionally, and in every other aspect of your life. I firmly believe it has a root cause in the fact that people listen with the intent to respond – NOT with the intent to understand (a quote made famous by Stephen R. Covey).

As you watch the non-verbal cues people provide as they are processing a message you often know they are itching to vocalize their response versus listening to truly understand the message content. It can be seen in people’s eyes, facial expressions, perhaps a twitch of their lips – many signs they are formulating a response rather than continuing to listen to the message.

Often the response is to receiving an incomplete message; they only heard some of what you said, or were only paying attention to half. Sometimes it’s completely off topic because they didn’t understand the totality of the message and spun off in a different direction based on their misunderstanding. So many ways to go or I should say…ways to go wrong when the message isn’t completely understood.

I don’t have a magic wand to fix this problem…. it really is tough. How do you make someone truly listen to you? I have no idea.

What I do know is that I practice listening with the intent to understand personally. This way I am not part of the problem. My Type-A personality fights against this, I find myself wanting to respond, maybe even giving non-verbal cues to my communicator – but I check myself and pull back. Making sure that I am focused on listening to the message in total. More often than not I am surprised to find that I didn’t really understand where the message was going to conclude – a surprise ending if you will. I do know that my communicators often respond with “thanks for listening” or better “thanks for understanding”.

If I do encounter a troubling conversation with someone who just keeps interrupting with a response, or questions, or just blocking the message sometimes I am so bold as to say “please listen to me with the intent to understand, not the intent to respond” and if that doesn’t work, sometimes I accept defeat and make the decision to stop the conversation. Nothing is more discouraging than trying to get your message across and floundering and failing. But, if you aren’t going to achieve your desired outcome, why keep going? I will terminate conversations with that message as well.

I encourage all of you to listen with the intent to understand; in your personal life, your professional life with all your relationships. You will be better for it, and I bet you learn more about everything!

#Communication #listen #understand #learn