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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. What does it take to be a truly great listener?
Chapter 2: What does it take to be a truly great listener?
In today's talk, communication experts Megan Stevens and Nicole Lowenbron argue that communication hurdles aren't from a lack of attention, but rather an issue of how we're listening. They introduce the concept of adaptive listening, or the idea that being a good listener means adjusting to what others need in the moment. They also share four ways to become a great listener.
Have you ever wanted to say to your boss, stop talking, you're not listening to me? I've actually said that to her face. Yep, I am her boss. And obviously, I didn't fire her. We were locked away in a rental house on a writing retreat, all out of snacks, behind on the deadline for our very first book about listening. So, you know, super low stress situation.
I wanted us to make up time and try to hit the deadline. And I wanted us to fix the section we had just written because it was not good enough. But every time I brought it up, Megan rushed past it until finally I snapped. Stop talking, you're not listening to me. Okay, listen, I was listening, obviously. I was not scrolling on my phone, and I wasn't multitasking.
But there was something else I wasn't doing. And it took us three years of researching the way great leaders, managers, individual contributors listen to figure it out. We asked the question, what makes someone a great listener at work? Across dozens of interviews, we heard things like, my manager is a great listener because she gets just as excited about my big wins as I do.
My work wife is a great listener because she tells me when it's time to stop whining and to get back to work. Now, we took all these answers, we wrote them out on brightly colored sticky notes, spread them across the dining room table, put them into groups, and that's when it hit us. It's not that people weren't listening at work.
It's that there's more than one way to be a great listener at work. Great listeners flex, they shift, they adapt what's going on in their head and what they say back, because yes, responding is absolutely part of listening. And anyone can learn to be a great listener.
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Chapter 3: What is adaptive listening and why is it important?
You just have to stop listening the way you want and start listening the way they need. We call it adaptive listening. And when you do it, you build more trust, you get better results, and you get it all faster. And you could start doing it right now. Now, some of you might be thinking, wait, do you mean active listening? No, not quite.
Don't get us wrong, active listening is valuable, but it was created in the 1950s for therapists and counselors. Not for a busy back-to-back workday with constant pings, talking up, down, across, virtually and in person.
Chapter 4: What are the four ways to become a great listener?
Yeah, work happens a lot faster than therapy. Maybe you know that, we know that, you can trust us. And also, there's a lot more interruptions at work, and it's the goals that are the biggest difference between active and adaptive listening at work. Every time someone talks to you, they have a goal they're trying to achieve.
Whether it's in the mid-morning sync or it's in the quarterly business review or it's just small talk all over the place, there is always a goal they are trying to meet. Now, don't worry, there are not infinite goals for you to learn. Adaptive listening narrows it down to just four. And the first one might surprise you because it doesn't sound like the active listening you might be used to.
We call it discern listening, and here's how it plays out. I was once coaching an executive who had to give a big, huge main stage keynote. And during the rehearsal, he was giving his talk, and there were 17 other people from his team in the room. And I heard him say this phrase 22 times, I counted.
The phrase went like this, it's not just X, it's Y. Like, it's not just more speed, it's more potential. Now, Megan and I love contrast framing as a writing tool, but she was concerned that people would assume AI wrote his talk because all over social media at the time, people were freaking out about that. AI is overusing contrast framing.
So I said that out loud, and he sighed, looked at the ground, and went, I did have AI write this talk. Yeah, so good thing for him and his team, I was using discern listening. Sometimes at work, you have to critique and evaluate. If you don't, the product could flop. The campaign could fail. The client relationship could fracture. But if that kind of listening makes you feel uneasy, that is okay.
The next one might make you feel more comfortable. We call it immersed listening. So think back to the first week at your job. You probably went through orientation, where you learned about the company mission, the org structure, how to set up your tech. What the orientation leader needed was for you to understand and remember what they said. You know what they didn't need you to do?
They didn't need you to raise your hand and say, I think this mission needs a rewrite, or this org structure, it's not working for me. That would be discern listening. Yeah, that'd also be very rude to do your first week at a new job.
Immersed listening is the closest to active listening because there are plenty of times at work where you just need to soak in all the details as long as you actually remember what you were supposed to remember. But again, immersed listening is just one of the ways you need to listen at work.
What about those meetings where time is running out, everybody is still debating, and somebody's got to make a decision? Yeah, that is when the person or the group needs advanced listening. That's listening with a goal of moving people people, projects, processes, forward. So that's listening with the mind of, okay, what has to happen next?
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