WE CAN ALL IMPROVE
Friday, May 28, 2021
Having a dialogue – with anyone, for story-telling, for story-listening, or to propel our agenda onward, is something we come to best, when we come absent expectancies of what we’ll hear, what we’ll learn or how we’ll be persuaded to see some situation or set of facts differently. But that only works when we aren’t hamstrung and tripped up by our orchestration.
We’ve seen it repeatedly in ourselves and others.
Open mouth, spit out words.
Listen.
Open mouth, spit out more words.
Listen some more.
Or we’re supposed to …
Observed, without audio, this would appear like conversation – and too often, our talking and listening overlap. When I should be listening, my mind often races ahead to the next thing I want to say, and conversely, when I am speaking, my listener is likely racing ahead in their head to prepare what they are going to say next.
This is challenging enough when face to face, but it gets compounded when we aren’t.
Whether on a Zoom call or at a town hall, we can at least see our counterparties. But, when we are on the phone – missing facial expression, missing nuance, missing a connection of real interaction. If we watched ourselves from a distance, without audio, we’d see that image over and over – whether we watched someone else or a film record of ourselves, we would see much the same image repeated.
Once our COVID isolation relents, getting back to face-to-face life is essential for many reasons, but mostly I think because we can take time to listen. We speak, always, with some unwritten script because we want to say what we want to say – but listening should be focused, without a strategic plan, taking in everything we can, like a sponge – soaking it up, taking it all in, squeezing, gently, to get it all out. Repeat.
When we have a conversation, it’s not so much what we put in, what we leave behind, as much as what we get out of it, what we take from it, what we take away.
And then, the other thing we do, far worse in my estimation, is when we interrupt someone making their point, explaining themselves – when we interrupt with, “Sorry, I’ve got to take this other call.”
We all do this.
We should all stop doing it.
Because it says something about ourselves – that we are rude, that we are inconsiderate, and that we don’t value highly the person we are interrupting. It doesn’t matter whether we are interrupting the person, or the thought, either way, it’s rude, it’s insulting, and it damages relationships.
The truth is that “sorry” isn’t the truth because it means, “I’m disconnecting from you because you and what you are saying aren’t as important as someone else right now.” And every time that happens, we should give our heads a shake and question what messages we are sending to friends, clients, and strangers when we do it …