60 Improve your Communication Skills
Acquiring these skills will help you to
give the other person the
respect and space they deserve to develop their own ideas – to
make their thinking visible.
Paying attention
Paying attention means concentrating on what the other person
is saying. That sounds simple: how can we listen without paying
attention?
Of course, this is what happens most of the time. We think
we’re
listening, but we aren’t. We finish the other person’s
sentences. We interrupt. We moan, sigh, grunt, laugh or cough.
We fill pauses with our own thoughts, stories or theories. We look
at our watch or around the room. We think about the next
meeting, or the next report, or the next meal. We frown,
tap our
fingers, destroy paperclips and glance at our diary. We give
advice. We give more advice.
We think our own thoughts when we should be silencing
them. Real listening means shutting down our own thinking and
allowing the other person’s thinking to enter.
A lot of what we hear when we listen
to another person is our
effect on them. If we are paying proper attention, they will
become more intelligent and articulate. Poor attention will make
them
hesitate, stumble and doubt the soundness of their
thinking. Poor attention makes people more stupid.
I think that, deep down, we have
two mental models about
listening. We hold them so deeply that we’re hardly aware of
them. And they do more to damage the quality of our listening
than anything else.
The first mental model is that
people
listen in order to work out
a reply
. This seems a reasonable enough idea. But it’s wrong. If
people listen so that they can work out what
they
should think,
then they aren’t listening closely enough to what
the other person
thinks. They are not paying attention.
The
second mental model
is that people reply in order to tell the
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