What's Missing From Your Conversations?

This week, I found myself giving the same advice to several clients: 

“Get out and have more conversations with people.”

Getting into conversations with others is how you learn and grow and build meaningful, trustworthy relationships. 

Life exists in conversation. 
Relationships exist in conversation. 
Business exists in conversation.

Language and conversation are the foundation for how we create our world. 

Conversation is how we connect, share ideas, set both intrapersonal and interpersonal goals, and meet and exceed those goals. 

The quality of our relationships is dependent on our ability to have quality conversations.

Conversation consists of both speaking and listening and most of us, to be honest, are terrible listeners.

Rather than hearing what someone is saying, we’re often thinking about how we will respond and relating the story back to our own lives. We love to hand out advice and share our perspective.

As Stephen Covey says in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”:

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They’re either speaking or preparing to speak. They’re filtering everything through their own paradigms, reading their autobiography into other people’s lives.”

This is both common and natural, but at the end of the day, the key to improving the quality of our conversations and therefore the quality of our relationships is to learn how to truly listen.

Learning to Listen

What does it mean to be a good listener? Mostly it means to be quiet and if you can do the one thing that you really need to in a conversation, you will naturally stop talking so much.

What’s the one thing? Be interested. 

Get curious about the other person and care about what they’re saying. Listen deeply to try to understand not just what the other person is saying, but what’s behind what they’re saying. 

You might ask yourself, “Where do these words, ideas, and feelings come from? What might be going on with the other person that they have this opinion or feeling?”

There’s a story that I think illustrates how this works. The story is that British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his political rival William Gladstone had dinner with the same woman on two different nights. When asked about her impression of the two men afterward, the woman said, "When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the most interesting person in England. But after dinner with Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the most interesting person in England."

Disraeli won the next election.

We can only speculate what happened in those two different conversations that led to a completely different experience for that woman. But it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Disraeli was a great listener and showed a great interest in the woman and what she cared about.

That’s how to build a great relationship.

This type of listening is more than just ”active listening” but listening empathically and demonstrating how we want to understand the other person and their viewpoint more clearly.

“Empathic listening gets inside another person’s frame of reference. You look out through it, you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their paradigm, you understand how they feel.” - Steven Covey

What happens when we take on this way of being in a conversation? We get interested, and as a result, ask more questions and develop a natural curiosity. 

We might start to use opening questions like:
“That’s interesting, tell me more about that idea.”
“I’d like to know more about that, where can I find out more about that?”
”That sounds really difficult.”

This is language that assumes nothing about the other’s experience of the world isn’t trying to explain or advise. This helps to create space for trust, and vulnerability, which begin to work interchangeably.

The next time you’re in a conversation, notice how much you’re interpreting and responding from your own autobiography, comparing your own experience of the world with the words and gestures of the other person.

Or the typical reaction as Stephen Covey characterizes it:
“Oh, I know exactly how you feel! I went through the very same thing. Let me tell you about my experience.”

This is a natural way of connecting with others, but it’s important to know that you never have and never will have the same experience as them.

We all experience the world differently from our own unique perspectives. Our uniqueness as human beings shines bright and it’s an amazing gift of humanity that we have the capacity to relate our experiences to those around us and to recognize when we’ve had a similar situation for which we might have some great advice. But we should not kid ourselves that it is the SAME experience as another’s because we all experience the world uniquely.

“Unless you’re influenced by my uniqueness, I’m not going to be influenced by your advice. So if you want to be really effective in the habit of interpersonal communication, you cannot do it with technique alone. You have to build the skills of empathic listening on a base of character that inspires openness and trust.”

- Stephen Covey

The truth is that most of the time people aren’t looking for an opinion or advice. What they need is simply to be acknowledged and to feel as though they are heard.

With that humility, we naturally withdraw from telling the other person what to do or giving them advice.

Instead, start to use language like, “What you’re describing sounds similar to something that happened to me. Would you mind if I shared some insights I got from my own experience?”

This type of language provides space for the other person to share more of their own unique insight and understanding. 

When we do this, we quickly develop trust in all our relationships. 

Summing Things Up

Relationships exist in conversation. Life and business both exist in relationships. To build more meaningful, trusting relationships, you must be able to uphold quality conversations. 

And that means being a good listener which means showing you’re genuinely interested in what the other person has to say and how they’re feeling. Good listening requires curiosity, empathy, and learning how to be quiet and ask curious questions.

This is a skill we can all stand to practice more of.

Learning More

For more on this, consider attending our special all-day event on Tuesday the 21st of March. In this full-day workshop in Zürich, we will dive deep into the language of these types of conversations. Learning how to use language as the building blocks for your most important relationships. 

“Unlock the power of language and transform your relationships in this groundbreaking workshop. Discover how the words we use shape our perceptions and learn how to communicate effectively and authentically to gain a deeper understanding of yourself and those around you.”

I’d love to see you there. You can find out more about the workshop and sign up here.

Until then, try out empathetic listening with the people around you. Notice how the dynamic and receptiveness of the conversation morph just by making these small changes in the way you listen.

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