Welcome to this card on active listening. Now active listening is one of the most powerful things you can do as an inclusive leader to help people feel more included, engaged, and for you to better understand your team members. To help you really appreciate what we mean by active listening. I’m just gonna walk through some of the different levels of listening.
So level one listening is also called download listening. This is where we’re looking at the other person. We may seem like we’re paying attention, but really our minds elsewhere, we’re thinking about what’s on our to-do list. We’re thinking about what’s for dinner that night. We’re not really giving the other person any of our attention.
Level two listening is conversational listening. So we’re not really listening to understand, we’re listening to respond. We’re just looking for cues in the conversation where we can add our 2 cents. Again, we’re not really, we’re not really paying attention to the extent that we can see what’s going on for the other person.
The level of listening we should be really striving for and aiming at is level three and above. But level three specifically is active listening. So this is really just giving the other person 100% of your focus and attention in the conversation. Level four, listening. Also known as deep listening is really the domain of people such as coaches, therapists, facilitators, people who listen for a living. So we’re not gonna go into that in too much detail.
Suffice it to say that when you are active listening, you are paying attention to certain things that can really transform the nature of a conversation. First of all, we become aware of whether we are listening with an agenda or not. Are you listening in order to get your point across? Are you listening in order to wait for a, an opportunity to say what you have to say. And are we aware of the other person’s agenda? Does that match the intent of the speaker? Are they looking for you to offer your support? Are they looking to just inform you on a particular issue?
Are they looking for you to assist with a decision? So when we’re listening with intent, we can spot that in a conversation and we can adjust our response, accordingly. And ultimately better listening means better questions. So when we’re, when we’re listening with intent, we ultimately ask more poignant and more relevant follow up questions, which can open up a whole world of possibility in terms of teasing out diversity of thought, better ideas, better creativity, better innovation.
So a lot of good reasons to focus on being a better active listener. And there’s many, many practical, tactical things we can do. Some of them apply online, some of them apply in person, but for the most part, it’s just shutting off distractions, putting down the phone, turning off the notifications, and committing before the conversation to giving that person a hundred percent of your attention.
