Hello, everybody. We’ve mentioned before the importance of relational skills, sometimes called soft skills. And in those, there are things like listening and questioning, and so on. And today I’d just like us to have a look at the idea of profound listening. Now that’s not just listening at a surface level. Profound listening is going deep with your client, making sure that you are absolutely and totally present when you’re sitting with them. Now, a lot of times what we do, is we prepare our materials when we got to a meeting and we’ve got our paper and our collateral. But how often do we prepare ourselves? Or do we walk into that room, and we’ve still got our mind on some other case, some other project? Or we’ve been caught in traffic, and we’re not present. So being present is a really important part of profound listening. Now, I would say that I’m a pretty good listener. And the reason I’m a good listener is because I’ve got a few skills that I use and remind myself of, even before I go into a meeting. I rehearse these sorts of things.
And the first one is this, listen with the eyes. Now we pick up most information in the world, visually. And so, if you’ve got your head down and you’re writing on a page and so on, it’s really hard to see the body language, the micro expressions that are on people’s faces, the exhalations. And things like that will give you information, and our bodies contain most of them are communicative skills.
The second thing is, don’t listen to the story, listen for what the story means. And that might sound a little convoluted, but people go, and then she did this and then he did this, and then this happened, and this happened, and this happened. No, you’ll get caught up in it if you start to dive into that minutiae. The idea is that we stay in context, and we’re trying to listen, not to the story, but for what the story means for that person. And if we can ascertain that, we can guide the conversation to a much greater place than just in that small detail where people get caught.
The next one is, listen for what’s not being said. And so quite often what you’ll hear is that people will have a conversation with you, and you would expect that they would be talking about something, and they don’t. I was working with a client of mine recently, and we were going through a number of things around goal setting, and those sorts of things. But I just happened to just twig that something wasn’t quite right. And I said, how’s your relationship going at the moment? And out of the blue, the conversation opened up. And what he really had come for, to talk about, was not about goal setting, but how he can re-engage, re re-energize his relationship. That he was living with his wife, and then those two people were just living parallel lives. And so the coaching took a very different task.
The next one is also power words. Now, it’s hard to say that, but what people will do, is they will stress a word or emphasize it a little bit differently. So if I’ve got my radar out for that, I can actually hear some of the power words that are meaningful for people.
This fifth one is a little bit unusual. Distress lies in the words people de-stress. And quite often what happens is that people will be talking to you, and hurry across a word or a concept. Now, I remember working with a steel manufacturing company, and I was talking to this CEO and I said, so how are things going? And he went, look, really good. We’re winning nearly every tender we go for. We’ve got more work than we can use. Our technology team has just gone out of the ballpark in terms of their ability to be able to create plans. We’ve got some welders and boiler makers that have come in from China, and they’ve been absolutely fantastic.
And that young bloke … Anyhow, everything’s going really well. And I just said, stop for a minute. Tell me about the young bloke. And he went, that over there. I said, who’s that? He said, it’s my son. I say, why is he here? And he went, he dropped out of uni and his mother said, he’s not sitting at home. So she sends him to work here. He’s disruptive, he’s not made for this. I said, well, bring him over. So he came over and I said, Matt, do you like working here? No, I hate it. Well, what would you like to do? He said, I wouldn’t mind being a tradie. I said, what trade would you like? He said a sparky. I said, you want to be a sparky? And he went, yeah.
So I rang a friend of mine that has about eight trucks driving around the city, with electricians. And I said to him, Steve, would you need an apprentice in the next little while? He said, I need one now. And I said, well, I think I’ve got somebody. I think he’s got a good work ethic. I’d recommend him. And he said, well, send him over to me. Now that boy, Matt, is still working as an electrician. His dad, who was the CEO, thinks I’m a wonderful coach, because I was able to help him with a problem that he didn’t even really want to tell me about. So distress lies in the words that people de-stress.
And the last one is, just be aware of judgment. Try to release judgment. Not everybody has the same sets of ideas as you. And when you’re listening, if you’re listening from your place of being judgmental about, well that doesn’t seem like a good idea. Or that’s not what I would do, then you’re probably not going to hear the things the way we want to. Now, remember if we overlay this around the filters model, and we also can talk about the PIES model that was one of the first things we’ve talked about. This is about the skills to go deeper in those relationships with everybody.