Be Heard By Speaking Less

SUMMARY

Do you only speak so that others can hear you, or do you communicate for deeper understanding?

Well, stick with me because this week, I'm going to help you understand why listening will get you faster results.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Speaker and Trainer of the year and Master Coach Trainer. Today, I want to continue our conversation around effective communication to build stronger relationships by helping you to be heard by speaking less.

Let me now take you through five key principles that will help you to be heard by speaking less.

Number one is to be fully present.

Number two is to show them you are listening.

Number three is to reflect for clarity.

Number four (this is a big one) is to suspend all judgment.

Number five (this enables you to do all these things that I'm talking about in your communication) is to listen for emotions.

Effective communication is a vital component of the world as it is today. The more you get technology thrown at you to do everything, the way people communicate is creating a lot more challenges than what it used to when we would just speak to people face-to-face.

So you must learn how to be heard in a way that allows others to understand what it is that you’re trying to put across.

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue this conversation around building relationships through greater communication by building bridges of collaboration.

I'll see you then.

TRANSCRIPT

Do you only speak so that others can hear you, or do you communicate for deeper understanding?

Well, stick with me because this week, I'm going to help you understand why listening will get you faster results.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Speaker and Trainer of the year and Master Coach Trainer. Today, I want to continue our conversation around effective communication to build stronger relationships by helping you to be heard by speaking less.

In last week's episode, you learned how to customise your communication so that you could remove misunderstandings - where you spoke in their language, where you checked in to make sure that you were actually communicating.

Well, this week, I want to introduce you to the number one skill that I had to learn so that I could create a communication that allowed me to get people to work together. 

This is a huge area where many people have the same challenge. So, if that's you right now, come along, watch what we go through here, and take these key principles that I will teach you and experience a whole new world of mutually beneficial communication without all the stress and conflict.

I witness a lot of people that just speak at people— where they're just getting a message across— their entire idea of communication is: “I speak, and you listen, and I need to be heard.” Then, they get frustrated when that doesn't happen —It’s counterintuitive. It gets the reverse result altogether.

When you speak just to be heard, you’re not really listening. You might even have judgments that you introduce into the conversation, and all that breeds is misunderstanding and friction. But you don't need to have those results anymore. You can learn to communicate with people, suspend any judgment, and actively listen to what it is that they've got to say as well.

My experience as I continue to grow in this area is that the conversations that I have are more enjoyable for me, for the people I'm communicating with, and they achieved better results.

One of the things I love about our brain is that when we learn things and then we do them, and it actually gets the result that we want, our brain sends out those pleasure chemicals that say, “that felt good. Let's continue to do that. 

As I go into today's principles, what I want you to do is firstly, give yourself some space to learn. It's taken me many years to unlearn the way I used to do it and slowly and incrementally increase my skill in listening (in the area of communication as a whole). I'm not perfect and never will be. But day by day, I'm learning more about this same topic. I am not only a practitioner of what I teach; I’m a student as well.

My experience and the experience with the people I've worked with on these things is that when you do this when you give feedback without judgment, and you learn to communicate, you actually have people really hearing what you have to say. They respond in a much more favorable way.

So, let me now take you through five key principles that will help you to be heard by speaking less. 

Number one is to be fully present.

In our fast-paced world, you’ve got a hundred things going on at once. If you're like me, that is something you're working on daily. However, when you are communicating with someone, the first thing that you need to do is show them that you are valuing the communication— you’re putting it all in. You’re not there listening half-heartedly while you’re doing a thousand other things. You’re present in the moment.

The neuroscience behind this is all around brain switching. If you’re trying to hear what your partner's saying while you’re listening to something on TikTok, you’re going to miss out on what they're actually saying. There's going to be confusion.

Your brain is designed to focus on one thing at a time. 

So, be fully present in the moment.

Yes, you might have a lot of things going on. However, suppose you are fully present in that communication. In that case, it will save you time and energy because of the normal misunderstandings that might happen that you can then move on to the next thing. 

So be present in your communication, not just so that you get what you want, and it's just good practice. It's just one of those old-fashioned values that I do my best to live by of just considering other people.

 Number two is to show them you are listening.

There's nothing sweeter to your ears than to know that someone is actually listening. This whole topic that I am talking to you about this week is helping you to be heard more. Because you're a human, I know that you like people to listen to what you've got to say.

 Just like you, you need to make sure that the other person or the group of people knows that you're actually listening to them.

 That can be done in several ways. It can be done simply by nodding your head by showing them somebody gestures to enable them to see that you're in the conversation with them by making eye contact and staying fully present. Whatever you need to do, make sure that the other person or people actually know with visible evidence that you are actually listening to what it is that they've got to say.

They'll feel way more valued, and the barriers will start falling.

Therefore, allowing them to be more open, give more effective feedback, and put everything into the conversation you both need so that you get the result you want. 

Number three is to reflect for clarity.

Once again, to do this, you need to slow down. You need to be fully present. You need to be listening actively and engaged to hear what's being said and what's not being said in some cases. To avoid misunderstanding, this key principle here allows you to check-in and say:

“Okay, so this is what I'm hearing right now.”

And giving that to the other person and allowing them to go, “yes, that's exactly right.”

Which, once again, tells them that you're listening and it allows them to go,

“Well, hang on a minute. No, that's not what I'm saying…." And remove any misunderstanding.

You can also reflect on getting this clarity by asking some questions.

So most of the time, my experience with my communication was I wouldn't ask questions; I would make statements.

But when you’re reflecting to get clarity, you better understand what's really being said, and the result is going to be better.

By asking questions when you're not sure and go, “Hey, I think you're saying this, but I'm not really sure. Can you give me some more information about this specific part?"

So, reflect to get more clarity.

Number four (this is a big one) is to suspend all judgment.

Now I'm talking to me here, as much as I'm talking to you.

I believe this is a skill that people, including yourself, need right now.

There are many opportunities to judge what you are hearing, what you are seeing, what’s being said on social media, and around the world. Going into a communication with no judgment allows you to do the three things that I already talked to you about. It allows you to be fully present, listen and reflect, and have a conversation rather than have yourself in a state where your buttons are being pushed. And you've allowed what was said to trigger you and, therefore, make your communication and your behavior off track.

Listening is not about finding things to rebut.

It's not about finding things for you to go against and to give your opinion on.

Listening is a logical process of information gathering. Active listening adds in that element of reflective conversation to get feedback to remove misunderstandings.

Suspending all judgment says: 

“I'm listening to you to hear what it is that you've got to say so that I can fully understand it by looking through your lens, by hearing what it is that your experiencing, rather than just look for something that I don't agree with.”

Number five (this enables you to do all these things that I'm talking about in your communication) is to listen for emotions.

Now I know that's a little play on words because you feel emotions and you experience what someone else might be going through.

However, listening intently and actively in the way that we've been talking about actually allows you to better understand what the other person might be feeling. Now, remember in the work you’ve done around social intelligence, you realize that social intelligence is the ability to understand what might be going on in the emotions of others.

Therefore, being able to have communication around that and go:

“Hey, I'm sensing that you're feeling angry, that you're feeling misunderstood, that you're feeling hurt…Am I reading that right? And how is what I'm doing, creating that…."

 So, getting a conversation going around the emotion.

Just like you, every other person on the planet is an emotional being.

Therefore, even though you can look like you’re doing over these weeks together at the logic behind communication — when the underlying emotional current when you are navigating through a conversation with deep-seated emotions— all logic can go out the window.

So, the greatest skill in being able to be heard more is to fully immerse yourself in the conversation with the other person and feel what's going on. 

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to be aware of what's going on in your own emotions and to use that information to manage your behavior.

Effective communication is a vital component of the world as it is today. The more you get technology thrown at you to do everything, the way people communicate is creating a lot more challenges than what it used to when we would just speak to people face-to-face.

So you must learn how to be heard in a way that allows others to understand what it is that you’re trying to put across.

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue this conversation around building relationships through greater communication by building bridges of collaboration.

I'll see you then.