How to hear what’s really going on for someone
As people, we have three main ways of operating:
• we Think
• we Feel
• we Act
And when it comes to communicating or talking to others, we’re usually expressing a combination of our thoughts, feelings and actions or intentions. We often do this quite unconsciously, not realising that it’s happening.
Let’s look at these areas in more detail:
Thinking is (in theory) a rational process. We evaluate information, we compare option A with option B, or base our decision on ‘the facts’ as we know them. We’re ‘using our heads’ or ‘collecting our thoughts’ as the old sayings go.
Feelings are a different matter. They might be emotions such as sadness, anger, fear or joy. They might be sensations; people often say things like “I feel like I’ve been hit by a bus” or “This just doesn’t feel right to me”. Or they might be more intuitive, “I’ve got a good feeling about this”.
Actions (or intentions) are different again. We might sense that we need to do something without really knowing why. Or, having thought something through and checked out how we feel we may decide to act, to implement a plan and get on with it. The tricky part here is that we don’t always know what to do or how to do it and that can lead to frustration.
And that’s where good listening comes in. A good listener will firstly attend carefully to hear the information (or lack of it) at all three levels, then feed back or reflect what is and isn’t being heard. This can then help the talker to fill in the gaps and build a clearer picture of the situation or expand it for themselves. This is the great thing about good listening: you don’t have to solve the problem, but you can help the talker solve it for themselves.
Here are some pointers about what to listen for at each level. You can combine these ideas with those covered in “ARE You Listening?” in Coromind Issue 5 here.
words by Dave Burton
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