Employee Relations

Reflective Listening

The basic skill of reflective listening is helping the speaker feel understood.

  • Repeat verbatim the content of the communication – words only, not feelings.

  • Rephrase contents – summarize the meaning in your own words.

  • Reflect feelings – look deeply and begin to capture feelings in your own words.  Include body language and tone to indicate feelings.

  • Rephrase contents and reflect feelings  - express both their words and feelings in your own words.

  • Discern when sympathy is not necessary or appropriate.

Helpful Phrases:

  • Your message seems to be, “I…”

  • You must have felt…

  • As I hear it, you…

  • What I’m hearing is…

Successful Listening

Why are most of us poor listeners?  Mostly because we tend to listen to the words in a conversation and fail to look for the meanings behind the words. This is because we tend to be self-centered rather than other-centered. We are more interested in what our next statement will be or how well we are getting our message across so that we are in projective listening to the other person.

Sometimes we daydream while we hear another talk. Our speed of thinking is four times as fast as talking speed.   As a result, we aren’t concentrating and we go off on mental tangents from time to time while pretending to listen.

Often we will reject what the other person is saying through our own pre-conceived bias.  This frequently starts an argument while setting up a roadblock to understanding.

Finally, we listen poorly because the day seems too short for lengthy interviews and conferences. By doing most of the talking yourself, it seems that you can keep the discussions within “reasonable” bounds. In short, there just doesn’t seem to be time to listen.

Here are ten guide lines to improve your listening ability:

  • Find an area of interest.  To listen efficiently, ask yourself, “What is being said that I can use?”

  • Judge content, not delivery.  Don’t focus on personality or delivery.  Find out what the person knows.

  • Hold your fire!  Make sure that you fully understand a point before you evaluate it.

  •  Listen for ideas.   Focus on central ideas; distinguish between fact and principle, between idea and example, between evidence and argument.

  •  Be flexible.  Be able to change directions in a conversation.

  •  Work at listening. 

  • Resist distractions. 

  •  Try to anticipate what the person is going to talk about.

  •  Mentally summarize what the person has been saying.

  •  Mentally question the speaker’s evidence.

  • Listen between the lines.  Look for facial expressions, gestures, changes in voice, tone and volume.