Thursday, November 29, 2007

Listen Up!

The 50% rule

As a young broadcaster some 10 years ago, I attended a broadcast communications training workshop in Islamabad. Two and half days later, I recall walking out of the federal capitol training center with some life changing advice. I had learned the 50 % rule. The instructors had come and gone, but one of them had said something invaluable, ‘listen’, he said, ‘you have two ears and one mouth, so you should be listening at least 50% more than you speak’.

As I started of as a boyish radio D.J doing morning radio shows on FM-101, one of the first advice I got was from my father. ‘You speak too much, you know, and now you are also getting paid for it! just remember, if you want to be successful, you need to know when to stop speaking, listen more and speak less, else you will run out of things to say quickly and no one will listen to you’. I remembered that.

Gone are the days of radio. I moved on and out of the world of air waves at least temporarily, even the National Broadcaster’s Excellence Award of 2000 didn’t stop me. But what I took with me were the lessons that changed things and my view of them thereon. I have developed my personal set of rules, for life in general and for communications in particular. No, this is not another one of those ‘father knows best’ sermon, nor is it the greatest key to success, what it is, is however a compilation of lessons learned thus far, a sort of a running ‘cheat sheet’ if you will. After all, nothing is interesting, if you are not interested.

How many times have you been misunderstood, or not understood at all, today, this week, this year? Do you feel that communicating is not one of your biggest strengths? Think again, we all start off the same when we are born, we communicate when we are hungry, when we need to be changed, when we want attention, and also when we want to be left alone to go to sleep, and don’t forget the first thing a baby does after being born….a loud cry to let the world know of the grand arrival! we humans are born communicators.

Even socially, the ‘close’ and ‘open’ signs on stores, the turn signals in your car, the telephone, the chain email, all are tell tell signs of our zealous efforts to communicate freely and effectively. So then, why is it so strange that most of the issues and challenges we face at work home and otherwise are related to communication?

It takes two – atleast two

Inadvertently most of us forget the basic principal of communicating, it’s a two way process. Remember hearing the ‘public service’ announcements? Or the ranting speeches of an opposition leader or the pompous, ‘me myself and I’ speeches of sitting head’s of State? Often, these are just statements of personal opinions, not necessarily a dialogue between the speaker and the audience.
Do you think, anything is achieved by simply blurting out what’s on our minds?
The mannerisms and ethics of communicating is just as important as have a message to communicate.


Completion Indicators – Take turns to speak

The first computer modems were called the ‘half duplex’ communicators; these early modems could just receive or transmit data at a time, but not both simultaneously. In order to work better, the modem’s used ‘completion indicators’ when the transmission was complete, a signal would be sent by the receiver to the sender to indicate completion or receipt of data, only then the next ‘communication session’ would start. This pattern of communication was based of the ideal situation in the human communications, that is, to take turns to speak.

During a conversation, or a negotiation, progress can only be made if both sides are given an equal opportunity to speak their mind.
Humans have been using language and accompanying norms to communicate for thousands of years. However, we still see that often, we override this norm to interrupt, prematurely abort and overtake conversations. I have seen this in meetings, in social gatherings and more so in conference calls and phone conversations. The physical absence of the two sides, face to face, reduces the reluctance to override a conversation.
So if you want to effectively understand and communicate well, you need to listen to the other person. Hold on to your thought, take notes if it helps your memory, but do not cut off someone in the middle of the conversation.

The difference between hearing and listening

So what exactly is hearing, according to the modern English dictionary, hearing is to ‘perceive by the ear’ while listening on the other hand is ‘to give and to pay attention to’. While one is a physical involuntary function of the ear, the other is a mental, cognitive, and voluntary function. You listen only if you choose to, else you can hear all you want and make no room for it in your mind.
So, why do we choose to listen? Perhaps we listen to learn, to find out more or to explore what we don’t know yet.

(The following is an excerpt from a cognitive psychology journal, and therefore really boring, read only if you are not convinced that there is a difference between hearing and listening, otherwise move to the next topic)

Dichotic listening procedure – borrowed from cognitive psychology
This is a procedure often used to investigate selective attention in the auditory system. In dichotic listening, two different auditory stimuli (usually speech) are presented to the participant simultaneously, one to each ear, normally using a set of headphones. Participants are asked to attend to one or (in a divided-attention experiment) both of the messages. They may later be asked about the content of either message.
In a selective attention experiment, the participant may be asked to repeat aloud the content of the attended message, a task known as shadowing. It was noted by a renowned psychologist in the 1950’s, that people recall even the shadowed message poorly, suggesting that most of the processing necessary to shadow the attended message occurs in working memory and is not preserved in the long-term store. Performance on the unattended message is, of course, much worse. Participants are generally able to report almost nothing about the content of the unattended message. In fact, a change from English to German in the unattended channel usually goes unnoticed. However, participants are able to report that the unattended message is speech rather than non-verbal content.
Pay attention to the silent cues
Often how things are said, are just as important as the content itself. Deloitte has training for Auditors, where they bring in former FBI agents to discuss questioning methods. The FBI agents explain that they often have two agents interviewing one person, there is one who takes notes and the other just observes the body language of the respondents. How people respond to questions is often more important than what they are saying.

Don’t take things at face value alone, people find it difficult to say no, but how they say things are often a pretty clear indicator of what they mean. Don’t wait for someone to come out right.

Summarize and confirm
Learn from the King, Burger King! Or for that matter, any fast food drive through window attendant, once you have placed an order for a medium chicken sandwich, with fries and soda. The attendant is keen to repeat your order, and verify if that was in fact what you had wanted. Too often, in our conversations, we forget to verify if we were walking away with the right idea. Our mind auto summarizes what we think was the message. If you don’t confirm what you believe was the intent of the discussion, too much room is left to ambiguity, try and avoid that.

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About Me

Stuff I have to say: The views expressed here are solely my own. My employer, clients, colleagues, neighbors, family, have got nothing to do with this….although I am thankful to them for putting up with me!