The Secret To Building Lasting Relationships
Do you want to know the secret to building and maintaining lasting and meaningful relationships? The sure-fire way to grow your influence with people by displaying that you truly love them and care for them? Shut up and listen to them.
But there’s a catch… There are different ways to listen, and these ways were not created equal.
There are three levels of listening: Internal, focused, and global.
When we listen internally, we are focused on ourselves and what the conversation means for us. You may be listening but you aren’t engaging or interacting with the other person.
When we do focused listening, we are focused on the person speaking. We tune into their words, emotions, facial expressions and posture which give us important context in the conversation to understanding them. This is important because most of our communication is non-verbal, and often times people don’t say what they truly want to, but when you are tuned into them you can get the real message, or know when to probe deeper with questions.
Global listening can be used if there are multiple people involved in the conversation. At this level you take into account the action, inaction, and interaction of all people involved in the group. By paying attention to everyone you will be able to better understand the entire dynamic of the group and ask increasingly penetrating questions.
But why is listening and asking good questions important?
It demonstrates that you value others, think about how good it feels when someone really listens to you. Listening has high influence value (the more you listen the more influence you will have with that person). Listening leads to learning for you, but also for the person speaking because they can truly talk through their issues, and often times come to an answer on their own.
So how do we get better at listening? Ask yourself the following questions:
Do I interrupt?
Do I have an open ear policy?
Do I want to hear what I need to hear?
If you interrupt it tells the other person that what you have to say is more important. If you don’t have an open ear policy then you talk without ever giving the other person a chance to speak. If you don’t want to hear what you need to hear then you will respond poorly to criticism and you won’t be able for form deep meaningful relationships with people, because it is impossible to really learn anything about someone until we have a disagreement with them.
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