Listen to Connect When You Connect to Listen! Use Virtual Meetings to Become a Better Listener
Connecting virtually provides a great opportunity to practice listening skills. In your online meetings, re-frame your intention from sharing updates, information or agenda, to one that focuses on the relationship.
Virtual meetings provide real-time feedback on how well you’re listening. Talking over others, stepping on their sentences or habitually interrupting are signals that you’re not listening. This is especially easy to do in an online setting, when you miss the full body language and verbal ques you’d have in a face-to-face conversation. It’s bound to happen, yet you can take this as opportunity to focus with greater intent on the other person and making them feel heard.
Listening to connect is bigger than listening to understand – which is more about listening to move tasks and work forward. Listening to understand keeps the spot light on you, your agenda and your understanding. Listening to connect is about the other person. It’s about moving the relationship forward. What are they feeling? What are they thinking and why? What are they hoping you will help them explore?
A virtual meeting is a terrific sandbox to practice these “other centered” listening skills and understand the other person’s world and perspective. When you catch yourself talking over others, stepping on sentences or doing all the talking – pause. Take a breath. It’s normal to feel pressure to talk in a virtual meeting. You may feel this pressure even more than when you’re on a phone call. When you see the other person, or the whole team looking at you on camera, it’s normal to feel an overwhelming compulsion to say something. That pressure you feel is about you, not them.
Even in a virtual environment, you can allow for a moment of silence…to listen to connect, not confirm, reject. Do this by acknowledging what the person has just said.
Take a deep breath in and out. Count to 4 silently in your head (breath in, 1-2-3-4 and out 1-2-3-4). It can feel like forever to take a breath and pause because you feel the spotlight on you. In reality it takes less than a second! Pausing to reflect communicates you’re listening and taking in what they said. The other person won’t notice and in fact gives them a moment to reflect as well.
Re-capture and re-frame what they said using your own words, for example, “Susan, it sounds like you’re concerned about vendor compliance.”
Acknowledge what they may be thinking or feeling, “You’re dealing with a lack of visibility to our vendor process and it’s stressing and you and the team. Sounds like everyone is feeling urgency to make decisions but worried about compliance violations.”
Validate their world and what they are thinking or feeling, “It’s tough now with all the processes being changed due to the COVID pandemic.”
Granted, not every meeting calls for this level of intent. Sometimes a meeting is simply a meeting to confirm tasks and agreement. And yes, technology can constrain interaction. Technology can also highlight conversation habits, both good and bad. Instead of using technology as an excuse not to listen, use it to gain self-awareness.
Brain-based tip: Listening to Connect.
When we take a few moments to turn the spotlight from ourselves to others, they feel heard and understood. People thrive with connection and affirmation. Neuro pathways open up. When we listen to connect we create dialogue, deepen bonds of trust and relax our anxious minds. This enable us to be more helpful, meaningful, and productive. Instead of limiting us, virtual environments can provide opportunities to practice greater human connection.
Susan Clarine is The Ei Coach®
Connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter @coach_ei
susan@theeicoach.com