Improving Listening Skills in Conversations

Here. His name is Collins Dobbs, and Collins teaches critical and crucial conversations here at the business school. And he has a methodology to help do that, and that methodology applies beautifully to listening. It's three things. Pace, space, grace.

To listen well, you have to give yourself a little bit of each of those. We have to slow things down. The world moves very quickly. We've got a lot going on. If I slow down, I can listen better. So the first step is to slow things down.

Second, you have to give yourself space. Sometimes it's physical space. Move to a location where you can actually hear better. As I get older, everything is louder in the ambient sound. Move to a place where you can actually hear. But also mental space. Give yourself permission to be

present-oriented in this moment, listening to this person. And then finally, grace. And grace is to give yourself permission to pay attention to what's going on in the environment, how the person says what they say, not just what they say,

and grace refers to listening to your own intuition. We have heard lots of things. We have seen lots of things in our lives, and we get intuitions that come to us based on what we hear and respect those as well. We often think listening is only what's coming in, but you can also listen to what's

happening inside you. So, but with a little bit of pace, space and grace and focusing on the crux of what somebody is saying, you can listen better. One of the best tools we can use to listen better

is to ask either clarifying questions or to paraphrase. We have this notion that we have to respond in the moment right away. If I don't respond right away, it means I'm not confident,

it means I don't know my stuff, and yet we can pause a bit to actually reflect on what we're listening to before we respond. So I can literally just take a pause. Some of us feel pausing is bad, but pausing can be great.

I can ask a clarifying question. That gives me a little bit of time. Or I can paraphrase, which is where I take something you've said, synthesize it, and present it back to you in a way that's distilled down. So it's not like what a five-year-old does

who just parrots back what you say. That's annoying. But you look for the key idea and you repeat it back. The thing with asking follow-up questions and paraphrasing is these are lower order cognitive skills. In other words, I can be thinking about what I wanna say

next while I'm doing those. So we're going to do a paraphrasing activity. It's very quick, very similar to what we did with Give a Gift. I... In a moment, I'm gonna ask you to find a different

partner in the room, and I'm gonna ask you to share a story of your name, and it can be anything related to the, your name you want. It can be very deep and meaningful. It can be fun. For 30 seconds, you're gonna tell a story of your name.

This activity is not about storytelling. This activity is about paraphrasing because the person you're telling it to is going to paraphrase what you said. And then they're going to ask a question because paraphrasing never happens by itself. It's always followed by something, maybe your answer, maybe

connecting to the agenda, maybe asking a question. So let-