Preparing to Listen

Welcome to the blog post that has probably the least compelling title I've written yet. In some ways, that is intentional, because if you clicked on the link and are reading this post, then you are one of the few people I run into who are actually interested in improving your listening skills.

The past few weeks, I've been listening to a lot of podcasts about.. listening. What may seem like a rudimentary skill is actually quite complex and deceptive. Hearing someone say words is one thing - listening is a whole other story. And deep listening, a term I heard about from Oscar Trimboli, is listening on a whole other level.

In a previous post, I wrote about the importance of showing your face during a video conference call. In this post, I wanted to dig in a little more on the first aspect - that being on video holds you accountable to be present and listen.

While putting yourself out there for the audience to see does certainly help keep you engaged, the main thing I wanted to highlight with this post is that distractions happen before the conversation takes place.

Think about the typical work day, and what you are doing in the 5-10 minutes prior to getting on a call with a customer or colleague. Many times, we are working on some other project up until the last minute, at which point we tell ourselves (or the people we are already communicating with) some variant of "I gotta jump on a call in one minute". We hurriedly hop from one topic to another, marveling at our ability to get shit done quickly and efficiently.

Unfortunately, the truth is not quite so polished and rosy. We set ourselves up for being distracted with that kind of cadence. We hop on the new call, and during the exchange of pleasantries, maybe we decide to check our email real quick, because the real substantive stuff hasn't started yet. Given the nature of email communications, chances are one of those emails is requesting a response from us - so now we are on a call about topic A, thinking about topic B.

Or, maybe we are in a bit of a flow state with one project, and not wanting to kill our momentum, we go until the last minute before the call. We then end up having to either purge the entire cognitive pipeline to be present for the scheduled call (which is not fun, and requires a spin-up period to get back into flow), or we end up on the call but not really giving it our full attention.

While these are just a couple examples, and they don't happen every time, I think they are good examples of how we set ourselves up for distraction, because I'd bet good money that anyone reading this has experienced one of the above, or something similar.

Fortunately, there are a few simple things that can be done upstream to help:

• Leave a clean checkpoint on what you are working on. Some time before the scheduled interruption (perhaps 30 minutes?), start thinking about the task at hand and where you can tie off loose ends to leave a clean checkpoint to pick up on later.
• Give yourself time to purge distractions and clear your mind. If you are going to do something like check your email prior to a scheduled call or meeting, because you were wrapped up in something else that left it unattended for a period of time - give yourself enough time to either attend to anything requiring immediate attention, or give yourself permission to read the email and then put it aside and attend to it later. Chances are, if it came to you via email, it's not actually super-time critical.
• Finally, put your phone on airplane mode, close out your email, close your laptop - do whatever you need to do to remove distractions during the call. Only you know if your phone beeping, buzzing or flashing during a call will be a distraction, so only you can know how to manage it.

Try really thinking on how you get distracted, and taking steps to eliminate those distractions prior to a situation that demands your listening attention, and see if you notice a difference. I find that when I am fully present to listen, my recollection is better and in the long run, it is actually a significant time saver.