How to hearken others?

I personally feel that people who listen to others are particularly high-intelligent people, such people can easily become the core of the team and the backbone, and easy to win the respect and trust of others.

Hearken – be focused, listen to what others are saying, and express your opinion when you need to.

When other people talk to you, listen with a sincere attitude and answer with eye contact and appropriate expression, such as slightly nodding your head when understand. Let the other side know that you are interested in listening.

If you’re too busy or not willing to hearken, then try not to start a conversation. It’s not polite to hear part of the conversation or interrupt the conversation.

A person is willing to tell you what he thinks. In return, you should appreciate his trust in you. When he asked you for advice, you should be true to express your ideas. If it is difficult for him to accept or face the issue, unless very close friends, otherwise do not say. Either just listen, or tell the truth.

Telling the truth is also skillful. The same words with different angles and tone will play a different effect. Having transposition thinking and tolerant attitude to suggest something he can relatively accept. Slightly exaggerated the good side and weaken the bad side. Give the other side with self-confidence.

If you are hearkening to strangers, it’s better not to ask for private content because you don’t know each other well. Because you don’t know their situation, you can’t give good advice, and also to avoid the embarrassment of seeing each other in the future.

When acquaintances have embarrassing questions to tell you, in fact, you may wish to tell a similar story of your own body (if any). I feel that it is a kind of relief and understanding. Some people just speak out to someone to relieve stress and seek understanding, so that the purpose is achieved. They feel that they are not alone, and some people can understand their feelings.

For close friends or lovers, you really may not be able to give each other any advice because you both know each other very well. You both know what each other will be likely to say in some situations. So sometimes your loved one will still want to talk to you to relieve stress. In this case, you can look at your loved one quietly, smile and listen. If he or she is tired, let him or her lean on your shoulder is the best way to comfort.

The importance of listening and feedback in communication

More and more people feel that the communication between people is more and more superficial.

The one who speaks, whose content is empty and boring; The one who hearken is not really listening with absent-minded. This kind of communication will result in both parties not receiving any meaningful information in it.

In fact, the reason why the speaker is unwilling to talk, perhaps the party that is hearkening is not listening properly and feedback. Similarly, many inefficient communications are caused by the problem that one of them not listening and not responding.

In essence, feedback and listening are integrated. If you’re not good at listening, you don’t know when and how to give the right feedback.

The importance of listening and feedback in communication is at least two of the following:

• If you don’t listen properly when you’re talking, you’re likely to miss out on valid information, or to lose the desire to tell, and thus to miss out on something you should have heard.
• If you don’t give feedback, don’t ask questions timely and don’t communicating adequately in the process of listening, it is very likely that the misunderstanding of information on both sides cannot be clarified, or you won’t be able to direct the other person to say more reference information before making a decision.

So how do you get the right listening and feedback?

2 Criteria to be held to listen correctly

First, there are two criteria that need to be held to listen correctly:

First criterion: Be careful to respect each other in the look and body language.

When listening to the other person, keep a focused and patient look. Do not interrupt the other person, and have a natural eye contact. It is best to keep your eyes within the triangle formed between the other person’s eyes and lips.

The second criterion: Let curiosity become the driving force of listening, and do not give comparison and judgment in advance.

When many people listen to other people’s statements, and their heads will come up some voices:

“How could he have so many things to talk. He kept telling useless information. ”
“Isn’t he secretly accusing us of this?” ”
“His eyes are not in doubt of the sincerity of our cooperation…”

The reason why you will have such voices in mind, because you made an emotional comparison and judgment in advance and let oneself into a combat state. On the surface, you look calm, but your heart is actually sinking into fear, doubt, and rejection. This makes it difficult for you to get effective information in the next communication, and it’s also difficult to communicate peacefully with each other.

The right approach should be to keep yourself listening in a simple and well-intentioned way, which can be done through practice. As long as you learn to empty emotional interference and let curiosity become the driving force for your communication instead of emotionally pulling with the other party, you will gather more information and find a better solution to the communication.

3 techniques to provide feedback

The best way to keep yourself in a curious listening state is to give feedback, specifically, we can use three feedback techniques:

1. The original feedback

When the other side talked about the more critical data, principles and standards, we can use the original way of feedback – repeat the other side of the content, and then to the other side of the information confirmation.

For example, if you are a supplier, the order you have received is $100,000 and you need to deliver the products within 3 months. For these very critical data information, you don’t need to add anything. You can confirm directly in the original context: “I confirm that you just mentioned an order of $100,000, the delivery period is 3 months, right?”

The original feedback is more suitable to confirm some of the key information that both sides care about, such as data, principles, standards and other objective information. However, it is important to note that you should not use them frequently in other inappropriate scenarios, which can make you feel unprofessional.

2. Request interpretation

When the other person’s statement involves a new point of information, you can request further explanation of what he says in due course.

For example, as a supplier, you want to communicate with your customers. The other side mentioned that other suppliers offer a lower price. You can ask him this way: “What is the offer?” Or ask further: “Can you tell us how long their payment and delivery cycle are?” Perhaps the reason why competitors offer lower prices is that they offer no advantage in terms of payment and delivery cycles. We are able to win customers by having more information.

In addition, you can ask him to elaborate further when the other person’s expression is general and unclear.

For example, the boss told you: “you’ve done a terrible job!” If you don’t know exactly what the boss is talking about, you can ask him for further explanation. You can ask your manager: “Do you mean I’ve been doing this job too long or is the finish quality not good enough?”

Especially in workplace communication, many times your guess is not necessarily correct. At this time you need to ask questions to confirm and find out the real problem.

Using the “Request Interpretation” feedback technique, you can get more explanation for new information. The question of “requesting interpretation” does not have to be precise, but rather to bring out the real key information.

3. Summary confirmation

When you give feedback through a summary confirmation, you need to summarize not only what the other person is passing, but also the other person’s emotions. We have to take care of each other’s real-time emotions and make sure they feel respected.

Once we capture the emotions that each other wants to emphasize in our communication, the best way is to express them for them. The way you summarize the other person’s emotions can be a statement or a question sentence. The beginning of the summary can be used with the phrase: ” (This matter) looks…” “sounds…” “seems…”

Remember never to use the phrase “I just heard you say…” kind of sentence, because the word “I” makes the other person alert. Let the other person feel that you care about yourself, not them, which will make you responsible for what you say next, in case of offending the other side, no doubt is your fault.

But if your summary is neutral, the other person will generally respond. And the other person doesn’t simply reply to you “yes” or “no” and they’ll tell you more. It doesn’t matter if they disagree with your emotional summary, because you have left room for maneuver. “I didn’t say it was that way, just that it sounded…”.

Let’s look at an example in life. If you and your friend are going to go shopping together, your friend wore a beautiful dress before going out and looked at it more than ten times in front of the mirror. At this time, you observed her emotions. At this time, if you say the last sentence: “It looks like you like this skirt very much”, it will make her feel that you are very concerned about her. Next, I’m sure she’ll be happy to tell you the stories about the dress, such as “Where did you buy the dress?” “What’s the price?” etc.

This is the role of emotional summary, which not only gives the other person a feeling of respect and attention, but also gives the other person a chance to explain themselves further and help us get more information.