Improve Your Listening Skills by End of This Video | Leadership Training for Engineering Managers
If you wanna be a great leader who makes an impact on every person you work with, you need to be a great listener.
But were you ever actually taught how to listen?
Odds are you weren't, because listening skills aren't really emphasized in formal education.
But don't worry, by the end of this video, you're gonna learn three techniques that will immediately improve your listening skills.
Stay tuned.
3 Biggest Listening Barriers
Hey everybody. Welcome to my YouTube channel. If you're looking to increase your impact as a leader, you've come to the right place.
One of the most critical skills for leaders is listening. And today I'm gonna teach you three extremely simple techniques that will dramatically improve your listening skills right away.
But you need to do all three of these techniques together. So make sure you watch the entire video, because at the very end, you're also gonna do a quick exercise that actually measures your listening improvement. But I wanna start by explaining the three biggest reasons why so many people struggle with listening.
Thought-Speech Differential
The first one is actually the most interesting.
It's called the Thought Speech Differential.
The average person speaks at a rate of about 150 words per minute. Meanwhile, the average person's brain can process and understand about 400 to 500 words a minute.
Now, just think about that, that means your brain can process about three times more information than a person can speak.
This is known as the Thought Speech Differential, and it's the main reason why you struggle to concentrate on what someone else is saying. Look at it this way, when you're in a conversation, the speaker's words occupy about one third of your mental capacity, therefore, two thirds of your brain's capacity is free.
Meanwhile, the human brain is super powerful and efficient, so it interprets this free space as down time. But the brain doesn't like the sit idle, so it immediately finds a way to occupy the empty two-thirds of brain space that's not being used.
Without realizing it, your brain begins to scroll through to-dos and open items, and it searches for opportunities to efficiently mentally multitask while you're doing this.
Look at it this way, when you're in a conversation, the speaker's words occupy only about one third of your mental capacity. Therefore, two thirds of your brain's capacity is free. Meanwhile, the human brain is super powerful and super efficient, so it interprets this free space as downtime. But the brain doesn't like to sit idle, so it immediately finds ways to put that remaining two-thirds of brain space, and that remaining two-thirds of capacity to work.
Without realizing it, your brain begins to scroll through to-dos and open items, and it starts searching for opportunities to efficiently mentally multitask.
And it's doing this all while you're in a conversation with someone that you're supposed to be listening to. Now after that clears, then your brain starts filtering through thoughts you've had over the last few days. It could be reflecting, it could be daydreaming, worrying, replaying something that happened.
Basically, your brain is under challenged and understimulated, so it's bored and it starts beginning to find ways to keep itself busy. And before you know it, 100% of your mental capacity, it becomes focused on anything but the speaker you're supposed to be listening to, and you don't even realize it when it happens.
The Anxiety Trap
I call the second listening barrier, The Anxiety Trap.
It starts somewhere in the middle of the conversation when you suddenly realize that you haven't been listening to what the speaker has been saying for the last few minutes, and now the speaker is all of a sudden asking for your opinion on what they just spent the last few minutes explaining.
You know that feeling I'm talking about? You realize you were daydreaming and you have no clue what they were just talking about, and you're busted. Panic starts to set in and you try to compose a response, but you feel behind, so you mentally start retracing the conversation you're playing catch up.
Instead of paying attention to the conversation and driving it forward. This is called Listener Anxiety, and it plays a big role in your ability to concentrate, focus, and listen.
Quick sidebar on this, if this happens to you, don't try to BS your way through it. Instead, bite the bullet right away by showing humility and apologizing. Admit that you got lost in thought, and that you didn't catch what they said. Most people will understand and they'll be able to relate to that without taking it personally. Plus it actually shows that you're interested in what they did say, but make sure you don't daydream when they explain it a second time.
Now if you feel like you struggle with focusing during a conversation, you might be interested in my episode called Three Powerful Techniques That Will Improve Your Patience and Focus.
Too Distracted
Moving on. The third listening barrier is that you're just Too Distracted to Listen.
You know your brain is busier than you realize. Right now you're watching this video, but the back of your mind is thinking about literally everything else going on in your life. It's processing through all your information intake and open loops like what you're doing after you watch this video.
Projects that you're working on at the moment. Recent conversations with people, social media posts you've just read, texts and emails that you haven't responded to yet. Your problems, other people's problems.
All of this is your mental cache. Your brain constantly filters through these items in the background all day.
It bogs down your mental processing speed and it distracts you from concentrating, focusing, and listening. It also distracts you from being present, and as it builds up, it creates overthinking, over analyzing and overwhelm, which leads to more anxiety and more stress.
3 Ways to Improve Listening
Now that you have all this background information on the biggest barriers to listening, let's dive into three techniques that you can start using to dramatically improve your listening skills.
Clear Your Mental Cache
The first technique is called Clearing Your Mental Cache.
Here's how it works. Grab an eight and a half by eleven notebook, and I mean a physical notebook with a pan or pencil, because it actually matters for this exercise. You're going to prepare your mind for listening by completing three pages of stream of consciousness writing in your notebook. Write about anything that comes to your mind, anything that pops in your head.
It could be to-dos, venting, weighing a problem, chores, your grocery lists, that dream you had last night, anything's fair game. But don't stop writing until you've completed three full pages and do this in private and avoid any distractions. Don't censor it or lie in it either, and don't even really read it.
Once you're done, just close it and walk away.
Do this in private and avoid distractions when you're doing it. Some more tips. Don't censor it, don't lie in it, and don't let anybody else read it. In fact, don't read it for yourself either. Don't try to make sense of it when you're done writing. Just close it and dump that information in the journal and walk away.
The entire point of this exercise is to clear your mental cache so that you can free up brain space so that you're not distracted when it's time to listen to somebody.
Bonus tip, if you feel like you have a busy brain, consider building this into your morning routine.
I do this every morning when I feel like I'm overwhelmed and I feel like I got a lot of stuff on my mind. I will do this first thing in the morning for a few weeks to just kind of flush out all those thoughts.
Declaring Your Intentions
The second technique is called Declaring Your Intentions, and it's really simple when you're going into a situation where you need to listen.
In your head say, I'm going to listen to this person because, and if you're not able to finish this statement, it means you don't have a reason to listen to the speaker.
So you won't.
Don't make this mistake though. Instead, right before entering a conversation, remind yourself why you're gonna listen to this person. Is it to learn about this person? Are you looking for specific information? Do you need directions or instructions from this person? Are you searching for common interests so that you can build a relationship with this person?
It could be that you want to make this person feel important, appreciated, or understood, or maybe you're just practicing your new listening skills that you learned in this video. It doesn't matter if your reason is noble or self-serving. All you're doing here is declaring your intentions and bringing it front of mind as you enter the conversation.
On that topic, listening and asking questions is the easiest and most effective way to win people over and influence them, and I explain exactly how to do this with a framework called Questioning To The Core. If you wanna learn more about this technique, check out my episode called How to Quickly Build Relationships With Anyone.
Vocalized Listening
Now it's time to put it all together with the final technique, which is called Vocalized Listening.
Earlier in this episode, I explained how the Thought Speech Differential is the main reason people get distracted and lose focus during a conversation while they're trying to listen.
In a nutshell, listening to someone speak only requires one third of your mental capacity, so your brain gets bored and it finds something more interesting to think about.
And before you know it, you're no longer listening to the speaker, but Vocalized Listening prevents this from happening by using up that unused two-thirds of your mental capacity to repeat, evaluate and digest the speaker's message throughout the conversation. Doing this engages 100% of your brain's capacity in the listening process.
You're basically tricking your brain into maintaining focus by creating a specific mental task for it to chew up all that bonus time. Now, this prevents it from getting distracted and it prevents it from daydreaming and thinking about something else, and here's how you do it.
In your head while the other person is speaking to you, just repeat what the speaker is saying to you literally as they're saying it. That's it. I know it sounds simple because it is. All you're doing here is you're forcing yourself to think about the speaker and what they're saying rather than thinking about your own agenda or your own thoughts.
Exercise - Test Your Listening!
To show you how simple this is and how effective this technique is, I want you to try it right now.
I'm gonna tell you a short, meaningless story and in your head, while I'm telling it to you, I want you to repeat everything that I'm saying. Are you ready? Here we go.
There were three fish, Jim, Jerry, and Jack, and they were great friends. They lived in a beautiful pond. One day, Jerry was swimming near the bank and saw some men. He quickly hid in the water, but he heard one man say, this seems like a good pond to fish in. We should come back here tomorrow and cast our nets here. Jerry was scared, so he quickly swam to Jim and Jack and he told them about what he had heard.
Okay. Now let's see how much your listening skills have improved. What do you remember about the story I just read you?
How many fish were there?
What were their names?
What did the one fish see?
Why was that fish concerned and what did that fish do about it?
I bet you remembered a lot more information than you typically would after listening to a story like that, and now you can use these three techniques to boost your listening skills and absorb everything you hear like a sponge.
But what about people who you're talking to? How do you know if they're actually listening to you or that they understand what you said?
Well, there's techniques for that too, and if you wanna learn what they are and how to use them, check out my episode called How to Make Sure People Listen and Understand You.
