Listening Skills - to Build Great Relationships

Good listening skills are the foundation to build effective relationships at home as well as at workplace.

Relationships and interpersonal communication play vital role in your personal as well as professional life. To have effective relationship with your spouse, child, friend or a working associate, you need to understand that person. To understand, you need to interact. Good communication skills make the interaction process easy, smooth and effective. Good listening skills are part of this process.

How effective are you in your interactions with others? How good are your listening skills?

Are you one among those who keep telling others about their own personal feelings and thoughts and do not bother about the other person’s thoughts and feelings?

Do you ever listen to them? At least do you know that in order to understand somebody, you need to listen to that person?

Many have no patience or desire to listen and no desire to understand. Active listening requires desire, patience, openness and skill. If you have the desire, other things: patience and skill, can be cultivated.

Form a habit of active listening and cultivate good listening skills.

Stephen R. Covey defines a habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill and desire.
Knowledge is- ‘what to do and why.’
Skill is- ‘how to do.’
Desire is the motivation- ‘want to do’.

In order to make something a habit in our lives, we have to have all three.

Active listening is not a technique.

A technique is a ‘manipulative’ quick-fix method: you just use it to get things done at that particular time or for a particular purpose and discard it when you got your result. That is why it is called manipulative. You try to manipulate the other person by changing your behaviour temporarily to suit the occasion or the person. Your main aim is to get the person act the way you want.

But you can’t get away with such techniques for long, as it lacks genuineness. When the person, against whom you are using the technique, senses that he is being manipulated, he wonders why you are doing it and what your intentions are. He does not feel safe enough to open up to you.

If you want to influence a person: may be your spouse, your child, a friend or any one, what matters is your conduct and the way he feels about you. Create openness and trust. Develop good listening skills.

Just words are not enough. My boss may tell me:'I appreciate you. I care for you.'

How can I believe him when I very well know that he does not understand me because he does not even listen to me properly? All I have is, only his words. I can't trust words alone without feelings.

Understanding the other person is the basis for developing a good relationship. Active listening skills help you to understand the person. I frequently observed that when some one speaks to us, our main aim seems to be: to reply.
We listen, no doubt. But we listen with the intention to reply, not to understand. We hardly notice his expressions or his inner feelings. Even while he is speaking, either we are rehearsing what to reply or counter; or, we are already speaking.

I remember one funny incident- again in the early days of my career. One of my colleagues went to America on an official assignment for a month. In those days, early 1980s, a trip to countries like America, Briton, Australia... was a rare opportunity. People used to play all sorts of tricks to grab a trip.

After returning from the trip, this colleague of mine went to meet the boss to update about the work and sightseeing in San Francisco. The boss listened carefully about the work, but did not give him a chance to share his sightseeing part of the trip. Within a minute, the boss interrupted him and began narrating his own experiences during his trip two years back.

This poor chap could not have the pleasure of sharing San Francisco with the boss. Instead, he had to sit and listen for 15 minutes.

It is a case of ‘Oh, I know exactly how you feel!’ I went through the same thing. Let me tell you about my experience’

I don't remember if he went on another trip abroad. Even if he went, he would not have made the mistake of attempting to describe it to the boss.

Most of us don't even know the importance of listening. Many parents keep telling children- What they should do, what they should not, how to behave... They refuse to listen to the children.

Stephen R.Covey describes an incident in his own sentences:

A father once told me, "I can't understand my kid. He just won't listen to me at all."

"Let me restate what you just said," I replied. "You don't understand your son because he won't listen to you?"

"That's what I said." he impatiently replied.

"I thought that to understand another person, you need to listen to him." I suggested.

"Oh!" he said. There was a long pause. "Oh!" he said again as the light began to dawn. "Oh, yeah! But I do understand him. I know what he's going through. I went through the same thing myself. I guess what I don't understand is why he won't listen to me."

This man didn't have the vaguest idea of what was really going inside his boy's head. He looked into his own head and thought he saw the world, including his boy. We never really understand what is going on inside another human being.

It is a simple description of what we all do. Understanding needs listening. You need to develop listening skills- good listening skills.

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