People Skills_How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts
Page 7
When used skillfully and infrequently, open questions may help the listener better understand the speaker without directing the conversation. In the report on their study of open and closed questions, Moreland, Phillips, and Lockhart write:
Crucial to the giving of open-ended questions is the concept of who is to lead the interview. While the interviewer does ask questions while using this skill, his questions are centered around concerns of the client rather than around concerns of the interviewer for the client. Questions should be designed to help the client clarify his own problems, rather than provide information for the interviewer…. If the interviewer relies on closed questions to structure his interview, he usually is forced to concentrate so hard on thinking up the next question that he fails to listen to and attend to the client.19
In addition to asking open rather than closed questions, it is important to ask only one question at a time. When two or more questions are asked in quick succession, the latter questions are usually closed questions. The tendency to ask more than one question seems related to the questioner’s inner uncertainty. It rarely facilitates the conversation.
My experience in teaching communication skills leads me to conclude that most people ask far too many questions. Putting several questions in a conversation is risky to the interaction; it tends to put the listener opposite rather than beside the speaker, dictating the direction the conversation takes rather than giving the speaker an opportunity to explore his situation in his own way. Almost everyone I have taught would have been a better listener if he asked fewer questions. Furthermore, I believe that most questions can be expressed as statements and that doing so generally is far more productive in a conversation than repeated questioning.
When people try to give up their overreliance on questions, they usually feel very uncomfortable. They may feel the conversation is floundering because of more periods of silence. Skills taught in this part of the book will help you refrain from asking too many questions and at the same time not feel too much of a void in the conversation.
Attentive Silence
The beginning listener needs to learn the value of silence in freeing the speaker to think, feel, and express himself. “The beginning of wisdom is silence,” said a Hebrew sage. “The second stage is listening.”
Most listeners talk too much. They may speak as much or even more than the person trying to talk. Learning the art of silent responsiveness is essential to good listening. After all, another person cannot describe a problem if you are doing all the talking.
Silence on the part of the listener gives the speaker time to think about what he is going to say and thus enables him to go deeper into himself. It gives a person space to experience the feelings churning within. Silence also allows the speaker to proceed at his own pace. It provides time to deal with his ambivalence about sharing. In the frequent silences, he can choose whether or not to continue talking and at what depth. Silence often serves as a gentle nudge to go further into a conversation. When an interaction is studded with significant silences and backed by good attending, the results can be very impressive.
Through the years, I have returned again and again to these words of Eugene Herrigel that describe why silence can be such a powerful force for a person whose emotions are intense:
The real meaning of suffering discloses itself only to him who has learned the art of compassion…7. Gradually, he will fall silent, and in the end will sit there wordless, for a long time sunk deep in himself. And the strange thing is that this silence is not felt by the other person as indifference, as a desolate emptiness which disturbs rather than calms. It is as if this silence had more meaning than countless words could ever have. It is as if he were being drawn into a field of force from which fresh strength flows into him. He feels suffused with a strange confidence…. And it may be that in these hours, the resolve will be born to set out on the path that turns a wretched existence into a life of happiness.20
Silence can be a balm for sufferers; it is also important in moments of great joy. How beautiful are the silences of intimacy. Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson sat together for hours one night in utter silence until one rose to go and said, “We’ve had a grand evening!” I’ve had many experiences like that with my wife, Dot, when we sat quietly before a fire or gazed silently into each other’s eyes, basking in each other’s affection. As Halford Luccock says:
This silence of love is not indifference; it is not merely poverty of something to say. It is a positive form of self-communication. Just as silence is needed to hear a watch ticking, so silence is the medium through which heartbeats are heard.21
More than half the people who take communication skills training with us are initially uncomfortable with silence. Even a few seconds’ pause in a conversation causes many of them to squirm. These people feel so ill at ease with silences that they have a strong inner compulsion to shatter the quiet with questions, advice, or any other sound that will end their discomfort by ending the silence. For these people, the focus of attention is not on the speaker but rather on their own inner disquiet. They are like the character in Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot who said, “Let us try to converse calmly since we are incapable of keeping silent.”22
Fortunately, most people can increase their comfort with silence in a relatively short period of time. When people find out what to do in silence, they become far less uptight in the verbal lulls that are so important to vital communication. During the pauses in an interaction, a good listener does the following:
Attends to the other. His body posture demonstrates that he is really there for the other person.
Observes the other. He sees that the speaker’s eyes, facial expressions, posture, and gestures are all communicating. When you are not distracted by the other’s words, you may “hear” his body language more clearly.
Thinks about what the other is communicating. He ponders what the other has said. He wonders what the speaker is feeling.
He considers the variety of responses he might make. Then he selects the one that he thinks will be most facilitative.
When he is busy doing these things, the listener does not have time to become anxious about the silence.
Some people are helped in their quest for comfort with silences by realizing that when the other person is conversing about a pressing need, the focus of attention is on him—not on the listener. If he does not want to talk further, that’s his prerogative. Why should it bother a listener if the speaker doesn’t want to continue the conversation? Many people believe that once a problem has been stated, it should be solved—in one sitting. Human behavior simply isn’t that neat and efficient.
Before the birth of Jesus, the author of the Book Ecclesiastes said there is a “time to keep silent and a time to speak.”23 The effective listener can do both. Some people sit quietly during a whole conversation, pushing the other into a monologue. Excessive silence can be as undesirable as no silence. To sit mute like a “bump on a log” does not constitute effective listening. It is rarely possible to listen effectively for a long time without making some kind of verbal response. Soon the mind of such an unresponsive “listener” dulls, his eyes become glazed, and it becomes obvious to the speaker that the “listener” is not with him. Silence, when overdone, is not golden—it is then merely a lack of response to the person with needs.
The effective listener learns to speak when that is appropriate, can be silent when that is a fitting response, and feels comfortable with either activity. The good listener becomes adept at verbal responses while at the same time recognizing the immense importance of silence in creative conversation. He frequently emulates Robert Benchley, who once said, “Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.”
SUMMARY
Listening is a combination of hearing what another person says and involvement with the person who is talking. Its importance can be gauged by the fact that we spend more time listening than anything else we do in our waking hours a
nd because our ability to listen directly influences our friendships, our family relationships, and our effectiveness at work. For ease of learning, this book treats listening in three skill clusters: attending skills, following skills, and reflecting skills. Attending is demonstrating by a posture of involvement, eye contact, appropriate body movement, and assurance of a nondistracting environment that the listener is psychologically present to the speaker. The skills of using door openers, minimal encourages, open questions, and attentive silence enable the listener to keep the focus on the speaker’s communication. The cluster of reflective listening skills will be taught in the next chapter.
CHAPTER FOUR
Four Skills
off Reflective Listening
Listening in dialogue is listening more to meanings than to words…. In true listening, we reach behind the words, see through them, to find the person who is being revealed. Listening is a search to find the treasure of the true person as revealed verbally and nonverbally. There is the semantic problem, of course. The words bear a different connotation for you than they do for me. Consequently, I can never tell you what you said, but only what I heard. I will have to rephrase what you have said, and check it out with you to make sure that what left your mind and heart arrived in my mind and heart intact and without distortion.1
—John Powell, theologian
There are three major clusters of listening methods—attending skills, following skills, and reflecting skills. This chapter defines what is meant by the phrase reflective responses and examines four kinds of reflection: paraphrasing, reflecting feelings, reflecting meanings, and summative reflections.
REFLECTIVE RESPONSES
PROVIDE A MIRROR
TO THE SPEAKER
The art of good listening involves the ability to respond reflectively. In a reflective response, the listener restates the feeling and/or content of what the speaker has communicated and does so in a way that demonstrates understanding and acceptance.
A child psychologist, speaking to a group of mothers, contrasted a nonjudgmental reflective response with the kind of interaction that is more common in our society:
Leader: Suppose it is one of those mornings when everything seems to go wrong. The telephone rings, the baby cries, and before you know it, the toast is burnt. Your husband looks over the toaster and says: “My God! When will you learn to make toast?” What is your reaction?
Mrs. A: I would throw the toast in his face!
Mrs. B: I would say, “Fix your own damned toast!”
Mrs. C: I would be so hurt I could only cry.
Leader: What would your husband’s words make you feel toward him?
Parents: Anger, hate, resentment.
Leader: Would it be easy for you to fix another batch of toast?
Mrs. A: Only if I could put some poison in it!
Leader: And when he left for work, would it be easy to clean up the house?
Mrs. A: No, the whole day would be ruined.
Leader: Suppose the situation is the same: the toast is burnt but your husband, looking over the situation, says, “Gee, honey, it’s a rough morning for you—the baby, the phone, and now the toast.” [This is a reflective response. It says in a few nonjudgmental words what the listener thinks the other person is experiencing.]
Mrs. A: I would drop dead if my husband said that to me.
Mrs. B: I would feel wonderful!
Mrs. C: I would feel so good I would hug him and kiss him.
Leader: Why?—That baby is still crying and the toast is still burnt?
Parents: That wouldn’t matter.
Leader: What would make the difference?
Mrs. B: You feel kind of grateful that he didn’t criticize you—that he was with you, not against you.2
From that brief interaction in a mothers’ group, we can distill the essentials of reflective listening. First, the reflective response in the leader’s example was nonjudgmental. Second, it was an accurate reflection of what the other person was experiencing. Third, it was concise. Fourth, as is sometimes appropriate, the husband reflected more than the words that were spoken.
PARAPHRASING
A paraphrase is a concise response to the speaker which states the essence of the other’s content in the listener’s own words. The italicized portions of this definition highlight the essential ingredients of an effective paraphrase.
First, a good paraphrase is concise. When people begin using this skill, they tend to be too wordy. Sometimes the paraphrase is even longer than the speaker’s message. When a paraphrase is not succinct, the speaker’s train of thought can be derailed. The effective listener learns to condense her responses.
Secondly, an effective paraphrase reflects only the essentials of the speaker’s message. She cuts through the clutter of details that encumber many conversations and focuses on the heart of the matter. The good listener develops a sense of what is central in the speaker’s message and mirrors that. Twenty-five centuries ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus put it this way: “Listen to the essence of things.”
Another characteristic of a paraphrase is that it focuses on the content of the speaker’s message. It deals with the facts or ideas rather than the emotions the sender is expressing. Even though a firm distinction between content and feelings is artificial, paraphrasing focuses on the content of the message.
Finally, an effective paraphrase is stated in the listener’s own words. This skill involves understanding the speaker’s frame of reference. It requires getting “into the other’s skin” for a while and looking at the situation from her perspective. The listener’s understanding is then summarized in her own words. There is an enormous difference between parroting (repeating exactly the speaker’s words) and paraphrasing. Parroting usually stifles a conversation, while paraphrasing, when used appropriately, can contribute greatly to the communication between people.
Let’s eavesdrop for a moment on a fragment of a conversation between Maureen and her friend Kim. Maureen was trying to decide whether to start a family or continue her career with a public-relations firm.
Maureen: I don’t know whether to have a baby or not. George isn’t sure either. I love my work … it’s stimulating and challenging and I’m well paid. But sometimes I yearn to have a child and be a full-time mother.
Kim: You enjoy your work so much, but sometimes you feel a strong pull toward motherhood.
Maureen: (Nods affirmatively.)
Kim restated the crux of Maureen’s content. She did it concisely and in her own words. Her response was a paraphrase. Indeed, some authorities call parapharases “concise, own-word responses.”3
When the paraphrase is “on target,” the speaker almost always says, “Yes,” “Right,” “Exactly.” Or she may nod her head or in some other way indicate that the response was accurate. In the snatch of conversation above, Maureen let Kim know that she understood correctly. When a paraphrase is inaccurate, the speaker will usually correct the misunderstanding.
Most people who learn listening skills feel awkward when they first try to reflect the essence of the other’s statement. Furthermore, many do not believe it will “work.” They think people will be insulted or worse if they use reflecting skills.
“My husband will think I’m crazy if I say back to him what he just finished telling me.”
“Are you kidding? Me use reflective responses with those guys on the assembly line? I’d be the laughingstock of the whole plant.”
“My kid will say, ‘You’re really weird—I just said that.’”
Actually, most people already do more reflecting of content than they realize. If someone tells you her telephone number, you probably repeat it as you write it down to make sure you heard correctly. If someone gives you directions to a location a couple of miles and a few turns away, you will probably repeat the directions to be sure you have them straight. When dealing with specifics like that, most of us know from sad experience that communication is often unreliable unless it is
checked out. We’ve dialed too many wrong numbers and taken too many wrong turns in the past. Communications experts believe that this method, which most people use only occasionally, could be applied more frequently and more skillfully in our interpersonal relationships. Most of us would benefit from more accuracy in our daily interactions. Paraphrasing greatly reduces the likelihood of misunderstandings. The kind of accuracy check that we make when we repeat a telephone number could well be used more frequently.
REFLECTING FEELINGS
The reflection of feelings involves mirroring back to the speaker, in succinct statements, the emotions which she is communicating. Fred, 34, told a friend:
Fred: I was so sure I’d be married by now. One relationship after another fails.
Rick: It’s really discouraging.
Fred: Sure is. Will I ever find the right person?
Rick realized that Fred could be experiencing a number of feelings—loneliness, anger, frustration, fear, discouragement, or a combination of these. As Fred talked, Rick “read” the body language and decided that discouragement was the principal emotion. The subsequent conversation confirmed Risk’s guess about what his friend was feeling.
Listeners frequently miss many of the emotional dimensions of a conversation. There is a tendency to rivet attention on content. If any reflecting is done, the focus is more on facts than on feelings. Or the listeners ask questions which elicit fact-type answers: “What did you do?” “When did that happen?”
I was deeply involved in a writing project when the telephone rang. It was a colleague calling from Chicago. I was delighted to hear from him, but slow to leave my own frame of reference. Soon he was saying, “I just got word that the January workshop I was going to lead was cancelled.” “Cancelled, eh?” I responded. “Yeah,” he said before we drifted off to some other topic. After we hung up, I realized what a lazy listener I had been. I missed the whole point of what he was saying because I didn’t know how he felt about the workshop’s cancellation. I gave him no encouragement to talk about his feelings, thereby directing the conversation into a discussion of content.