Why Active Listening is Essential in Hard Conversations

Last week’s article was about asking questions to protect yourself in hard conversations. Rebecca Campbell shared this on my LinkedIn post about the article. 

“I've been thinking about this one for the last couple of days—probably because I've advised people to do exactly what you're laying out in this Dot Release. My new thought is this: the technique can be reinforced with active listening. Asking questions is important, but so is repeating back to someone what you're hearing. That helps you start from a common place of understanding and work from there.”

Rebecca is spot on! I’ve been pondering what to write about active listening when so much good stuff has already been written on the topic. What could I add that might be useful? Then I remembered an experience that made me personally a much better listener and it also shows why listening makes conversations better.

One key principle of active listening is to not just use the time the other person is talking to plan what you’ll say next. It’s easy to focus on our next sentence rather than on what the other person is saying and I used to do it a lot. 

Here’s what helped me become a better listener. I took improv classes and performed semi-professionally in the early aughts. (Semi-pro meant that people paid to see us but we didn’t get paid.) A big part of improv is living completely in the moment and focusing on what everyone else on stage is doing. 

One thing we spent a lot of time learning was how to create a good short scene based on an audience suggestion, like “a couple breaks up in a busy restaurant.” I was terrible at this when I started doing improv. I was terrible because I would approach the scene with a mini script in my head. This was a terrible idea. Instead of improvising a scene with the other players, I’d try to force the scene into the script in my head. 

Here’s a terrible example of what it might look like using that breakup suggestion. As I’ve walked on stage I’ve already decided that the couple are the cook and the waitress, and they’re going to break up because the cook  is in love with a regular customer.  

Me, playing a waitress running into the restaurant kitchen: Geez, Mary Lou orders the same thing every day. Poached eggs and toast. She’s got to be the most boring person on earth.  

Cook: And the toaster is broken! I’ll make her my special cherry tarantula pancakes and get her out of her rut. 

Me: Oh, I bet she’s so boring nothing would change her. But you probably like that, the way you poach her eggs every day. 

See: the other player has introduced two new ideas, a broken toaster and cherry tarantula* pancakes, and I’ve just ignored them. I haven’t listened and incorporated them into the scene. Here’s what it could look like if I’d been really listening.

Me: Geez, Mary Lou orders the same thing every day. Poached eggs and toast. She’s got to be the most boring person on earth.  

Cook: Well the toaster is broken! I’ll make her my special cherry tarantula pancakes-maybe that will get her out of her rut. 

Me: Our special cherry tarantula pancakes! You said you only made those for me.

Cook: I’m sorry, sweetheart. My genius is too great to keep to myself. I must share my pancakes with the world! 

Me: Share them with the world then. But you’ll never make them for me again. We’re done! 

And . . . scene. Yes, this is silly, but it’s improv. Now imagine we have to replay that whole scene first as a film noir then as a Looney Tunes cartoon :). 

A concept from improv that you often hear about in the business world is the idea of “yes, and.” “Yes, and” is the idea that you don’t deny the reality the other person is laying down, you build on it. In my bad example, I wasn’t explicitly denying what the other player laid down, but I was NOT “yes, anding” it. I was ignoring it. In a good conversation, the dialogue is mostly connected. It doesn’t look like two different scripts randomly spliced together. 

In order to “yes, and” you have to both listen and incorporate what you heard into your thinking. That’s why active listening is essential in a hard conversation. Otherwise, it’s not a conversation at all.  

Your Dot Release: Assess how good you are at listening to understand rather than listening to respond. In three conversations this week notice how long you listen to understand before you tune out to think about how to respond. Awareness is the first step and sometimes all the nudge you need to focus more on what the other person is saying.

Release Notes: Next week I’m going to talk about when NOT to start with questions. I got a great question from a reader about how to handle or prevent questions from backfiring and we’ll be talking about that. 

*Yes, tarantulas are edible. After this appeared on my screen from some far reaches of my brain, I had to check. 

This article is part of a series about Hard Conversations.