Unplug your headphones and instead listen to those who are talking to you. This is super important!
Communication is above all the art of listening well. Small reminder of some essential principles.
Free yourself from two brakes!
- A priori – the tendency to judge a thing, a situation or a person before they have even opened their mouths. This is a way of disqualifying your interlocutor, as if you knew in advance what he was going to tell you and that it did not interest you;
- Opposition – is the temptation to say “no” just to assert yourself or exist. To create opposition is to close your listening, instead of opening your ears to what the other person wants to tell you.
Learn to listen in three steps!
In the world of work, you teach a three-step way of listening which can also be very useful with family or friends, when you are not sure you have understood or heard correctly.
- Mark a moment of silence to think about what you have been told.
- Dig: “What do you mean? “, ” Why?”
- Rephrase. Essential in what is called “active listening”, rephrasing is repeating in your own words what you have heard and understood. “As long as we have not rephrased it, it is as if we had not sent an acknowledgment of receipt to our interlocutor,”.
It is, in fact, a way of taking into account what has been said (“Are you asking me to do this and that?”) Without being afraid of being taken for a stuck. Better to be sure you understood correctly than to do the reverse of what was asked.
Follow the four steps of non-violent communication!
Finally, if you have the impression that you are not being listened to enough, or badly, because ultimately communication must be done in both directions to be a real dialogue and not a simple monologue, you can draw inspiration from the techniques of Nonviolent Communication developed in the mid-1960s by Marshall B. Rosenberg, doctor of clinical psychology.
Concretely, this can take place in four stages:
- Start by addressing the facts (For example, “Mom, I was supposed to see you on Sunday”)
- Express your feeling. Say “I’m annoyed” if that’s the case rather than “You’re annoying me.” If you want to be heard and listened to, using the “I” is essential rather than the famous “you who kill”.
- Say what you need. “I need you to do this or that” Direct requests perceived as orders are likely to trigger a negative reaction
- Finally, make a positive and negotiable request. Always give the other person the opportunity to make you a counter-offer that you would not have thought of but which may turn out to be a better idea.
And never forget that the most important things are said as you are about to leave. Doctors and caregivers call this “doorknob syndrome”. It’s when time is running out that we get to the point. Is this why we often hang out on the doormat when we separate, which has the gift of curling our companions into a ball?
Reference: https://zapier.com/blog/become-a-better-listener/
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