Success is listening
It may be a truism, but nobody listens! In fact you could go as far as to say that nobody ever listens! But what has been observed in committees, and is completely transferable to the entrepreneur/investor meeting is that some people are so eager to be heard that they’ve not bothered to listen to what the other person is saying in the group. You may indeed be nervous about this first meeting, bearing in mind it could be the last meeting and therefore you want to make the right impression. And so, of course, you’ll be involved in preparation or rehearsal, or whatever phrase you want to use. The point is though, that you can’t keep on rehearsing this to the point that you are oblivious to whatever else is going on in the vicinity.
Listening is an art form
Half the skill of conversation is the ability to listen. It’s more than an ability, it’s an art. The clever conversationalist is usually not the one who says the most words and holds the stage for the longest time, but the person who listens the most carefully and is able to make a particularly trenchant comment at a crucial moment. That person is the one remembered, not the monotonous person who’s train of thought has been ceased upon and reduced to a pithy statement.
While the most important elements in business communication of any kind is mutual understanding. Mutual understanding is impossible without the occasional shifting of a point of view. That is you must trade positions with the person with whom you are communicating to try to see things the way he or she sees them.
You must put yourself in the other person’s shoes for the moment in order to understand that person’s feelings thoughts or ideas. This act requires imagination and mental agility. Without imagining what the other person thinks or feels, you do not really involve yourself in true communication. If such a person does not trade with you when you are explaining your own unique idea, he or she will not be involved in communication either. The trick of mutual understanding – the purpose of communication – is in being able to shift your point of view with accuracy and agility.
You have to be able not only to be in your own shoes and say what you’re saying, but you must be able to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and evaluate what you are saying in his or her way.
Listening versus hearing
A lot of the success of such understanding relies on the communicator’s ability to make the other person see things exactly as the communicator sees them. The easiest thing to see through another’s eyes is a visual scene. This is the value of good story telling technique. The communicator relies on anecdotes with the anecdotes bringing the idea alive to the communicant.
To listen is the put together all the sounds that you hear and assemble them into a picture in your mind’s eye. Through sounds you hear, you can form a picture of something you have never seen yourself.
By assembling the sounds you hear into a picture outside yourself, you are performing an important skill of active listening. Active listening is, in turn, the key to mutual understanding, which I mentioned earlier.
By imagining sights communicated through the words of another person, you can put together a picture that is the same as seen by the other person. The complicated picture you assemble is the essence of pure communication. You can actually leave your own world, and become part of the world of your investor and live that person’s experiences along with him or her. To do so you move from your own point of view to their point of view. This is a magical journey that enables you to go somewhere that you’ve not been before, to see things you’ve never seen, to experience feelings you might not have felt previously.
The key to communication is your own desire to come to know the person with whom you are in communication. To understand and see the world through other eyes, to think the way another is thinking. The key to this type of inter-relationship is your ability to actively listen to whatever he or she has to say and to recreate what is being conveyed through words in your own reconstructed images and emotional pictures.
Creative listening
It takes work to listen creatively, it takes effort, but when you do manage to listen creatively you establish a bridge between yourself and the investor that becomes a two-way avenue of understanding. You become more alive by sharing your feelings and their feelings and imaginings, and they become more alive being able to lead you into another world, their world.
So many people cut off any chance of communication by tuning out when somebody is talking to them in order to rehearse what they are going to say when it comes to their turn, that it’s hard to believe that any communication can ever be effective. Once the bond of communication is severed it is difficult ever to re-establish it.
So whenever you listen to anyone else speak you should always keep one question in the back of your mind, ‘What do those words mean to this person?’ Words are planks in the bridge of communication, but words have different shades of meaning to different people. What one word means to you may mean something else to the person with whom you are in the act of communicating.
By keeping in mind this essential difference you remind yourself that you are listening to another person who is unique and who sees the world in an individual world that is different than yours. You are trying to understand the thoughts and feelings experienced by that person by carefully following his words and phrases and absorbing their meaning. Creative listening allows you to put together what the message is. Emotions are difficult to put in to words. Unlike a conversation between two people discussing substantial things in a new start up. Which is completely different of course between two people having a conversation that deals only in emotion.
When such a communication is established it is likely that the listener may try to help the communicator put those complex ideas and feelings into proper words for articulation. The creative listener helps as much as possible. ‘I don’t quite know what you are saying. Can you put it into other words? Do you mean something like this . . . ?’
Active listening
Listening is not a passive activity. Unless your mind and persona are involved, you’re not really listening at all. You are just hearing sounds.
Consider yourself the listener and the other person the speaker. You are performing active listening. Your listener is a feeling, thinking person. You may not necessarily agree with what the speaker, in this case the investor, is saying but you do acknowledge the legitimacy of the communication by a remark or two. These remarks forming an effective response are what constitutes feedback. Feedback is reaction that goes back to the speaker as assurance that he or she counts for something, not because of what is said, but because the speaker is involved in communication.
Without some kind of valid feedback from you to show that you are actively participating in the conversation the speaker might easily feel put down and invalidated as an individual. To sit there and listen without displaying a shade of emotion, or making any indication that you are hearing what is said is to make the speaker feel you are non-existent. Clearly this is not the impression or situation that you want to create with an investor.
Such a conversation would gradually slide to a halt. The only option for the speaker in this case would be to pack up and disappear.
Next time we'll cover how the 'active listener' must then give feedback in order to cement the verbal relationship.
Link
http://www.go-between.co.uk
It may be a truism, but nobody listens! In fact you could go as far as to say that nobody ever listens! But what has been observed in committees, and is completely transferable to the entrepreneur/investor meeting is that some people are so eager to be heard that they’ve not bothered to listen to what the other person is saying in the group. You may indeed be nervous about this first meeting, bearing in mind it could be the last meeting and therefore you want to make the right impression. And so, of course, you’ll be involved in preparation or rehearsal, or whatever phrase you want to use. The point is though, that you can’t keep on rehearsing this to the point that you are oblivious to whatever else is going on in the vicinity.
Listening is an art form
Half the skill of conversation is the ability to listen. It’s more than an ability, it’s an art. The clever conversationalist is usually not the one who says the most words and holds the stage for the longest time, but the person who listens the most carefully and is able to make a particularly trenchant comment at a crucial moment. That person is the one remembered, not the monotonous person who’s train of thought has been ceased upon and reduced to a pithy statement.
While the most important elements in business communication of any kind is mutual understanding. Mutual understanding is impossible without the occasional shifting of a point of view. That is you must trade positions with the person with whom you are communicating to try to see things the way he or she sees them.
You must put yourself in the other person’s shoes for the moment in order to understand that person’s feelings thoughts or ideas. This act requires imagination and mental agility. Without imagining what the other person thinks or feels, you do not really involve yourself in true communication. If such a person does not trade with you when you are explaining your own unique idea, he or she will not be involved in communication either. The trick of mutual understanding – the purpose of communication – is in being able to shift your point of view with accuracy and agility.
You have to be able not only to be in your own shoes and say what you’re saying, but you must be able to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and evaluate what you are saying in his or her way.
Listening versus hearing
A lot of the success of such understanding relies on the communicator’s ability to make the other person see things exactly as the communicator sees them. The easiest thing to see through another’s eyes is a visual scene. This is the value of good story telling technique. The communicator relies on anecdotes with the anecdotes bringing the idea alive to the communicant.
To listen is the put together all the sounds that you hear and assemble them into a picture in your mind’s eye. Through sounds you hear, you can form a picture of something you have never seen yourself.
By assembling the sounds you hear into a picture outside yourself, you are performing an important skill of active listening. Active listening is, in turn, the key to mutual understanding, which I mentioned earlier.
By imagining sights communicated through the words of another person, you can put together a picture that is the same as seen by the other person. The complicated picture you assemble is the essence of pure communication. You can actually leave your own world, and become part of the world of your investor and live that person’s experiences along with him or her. To do so you move from your own point of view to their point of view. This is a magical journey that enables you to go somewhere that you’ve not been before, to see things you’ve never seen, to experience feelings you might not have felt previously.
The key to communication is your own desire to come to know the person with whom you are in communication. To understand and see the world through other eyes, to think the way another is thinking. The key to this type of inter-relationship is your ability to actively listen to whatever he or she has to say and to recreate what is being conveyed through words in your own reconstructed images and emotional pictures.
Creative listening
It takes work to listen creatively, it takes effort, but when you do manage to listen creatively you establish a bridge between yourself and the investor that becomes a two-way avenue of understanding. You become more alive by sharing your feelings and their feelings and imaginings, and they become more alive being able to lead you into another world, their world.
So many people cut off any chance of communication by tuning out when somebody is talking to them in order to rehearse what they are going to say when it comes to their turn, that it’s hard to believe that any communication can ever be effective. Once the bond of communication is severed it is difficult ever to re-establish it.
So whenever you listen to anyone else speak you should always keep one question in the back of your mind, ‘What do those words mean to this person?’ Words are planks in the bridge of communication, but words have different shades of meaning to different people. What one word means to you may mean something else to the person with whom you are in the act of communicating.
By keeping in mind this essential difference you remind yourself that you are listening to another person who is unique and who sees the world in an individual world that is different than yours. You are trying to understand the thoughts and feelings experienced by that person by carefully following his words and phrases and absorbing their meaning. Creative listening allows you to put together what the message is. Emotions are difficult to put in to words. Unlike a conversation between two people discussing substantial things in a new start up. Which is completely different of course between two people having a conversation that deals only in emotion.
When such a communication is established it is likely that the listener may try to help the communicator put those complex ideas and feelings into proper words for articulation. The creative listener helps as much as possible. ‘I don’t quite know what you are saying. Can you put it into other words? Do you mean something like this . . . ?’
Active listening
Listening is not a passive activity. Unless your mind and persona are involved, you’re not really listening at all. You are just hearing sounds.
Consider yourself the listener and the other person the speaker. You are performing active listening. Your listener is a feeling, thinking person. You may not necessarily agree with what the speaker, in this case the investor, is saying but you do acknowledge the legitimacy of the communication by a remark or two. These remarks forming an effective response are what constitutes feedback. Feedback is reaction that goes back to the speaker as assurance that he or she counts for something, not because of what is said, but because the speaker is involved in communication.
Without some kind of valid feedback from you to show that you are actively participating in the conversation the speaker might easily feel put down and invalidated as an individual. To sit there and listen without displaying a shade of emotion, or making any indication that you are hearing what is said is to make the speaker feel you are non-existent. Clearly this is not the impression or situation that you want to create with an investor.
Such a conversation would gradually slide to a halt. The only option for the speaker in this case would be to pack up and disappear.
Next time we'll cover how the 'active listener' must then give feedback in order to cement the verbal relationship.
Link
http://www.go-between.co.uk
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