Listen With Your Hands

You’d better listen with your hands, not with your heart.

Listening is undoubtedly one of the key success factors for interviews, negotiations, and relationships. Listening seems easy. All you need to do is open your ears and listen. Then why the Internet is full of advice on active listening? And why does traditional advice on listening not seem to work?

The problem with listening is that there are a few very powerful things that get in the way. And the problem with the traditional advice about active listening is that often it teaches you how to pretend that you are listening, rather than how to actually listen. Let’s unpack both things and try to find a better approach.

The biggest barrier to the effective listening

The most important thing that gets in the way of effective listening is emotion. It can be an overall emotional state during an interview or another crucial conversation. Stakes are high so we get excited, worried, nervous. An even bigger obstacle to effective listening is our emotional reaction to what we hear.

The problem is not that we emotionally react to a message we hear. The real problem is that emotions work as a strong filter and create distorted perceptions of what the other person says. To quote one of my favorite books on effective communication, “Talk Lean: Shorter Meetings. Quicker Results. Better Relations”,

Human beings are likely to retain from a conversation primarily - and often solely - the things which have the most emotional impact on them, the things which cause a shot of adrenaline to start coursing through their veins and which crowd out other information.

What gets us emotional in an interview? Difficult questions about career gaps, inquiries about seeming inconsistencies in our career paths, lack of all the skills required in the job description, et cetera. When we get questions like this, no matter how well we are prepared, we get emotional. And get defensive. And that gets in the way of interview success.

“No” is not the end of the conversation

However, the biggest, primal emotion that makes us really bad listeners during an interview is the fear of rejection, fear of hearing “No”. What is going on when we hear “No”? We get upset, confused and defensive. Of the entire message that contained this “No”, we have filtered out solely this two-letter word. We have not heard anything else. And that’s not smart, because we have missed the overall context and hidden opportunities that often surround “No”.

I love the story told Chris Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator and the author of “Never Split the Difference: Negotiate as if Your Life Depended on It”, told about the beginnings of his negotiation career. Two years after having started at the FBI, he wanted to join the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Team in New York.

A few weeks after I got to Manhattan, I showed up at the desk of Amy Bonderow, who ran the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Team in New York. I didn’t not beans about negotiating, so I went for the direct approach.

“I want to be a hostage negotiator,” I said.

“Everyone does - got any training?" she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Any credentials?”

“Nope.” I answered.

“Do you have a degree in psychology, sociology, anything at all related to negotiation?”

“No.”

“Looks like you answered your own question,” she said. “No. Go away.”

“Go away?” I protested. “Really?”

“Yep. As in, ’Leave me alone’. Everybody wants to be a hostage negotiator. And you have no résumé, experience or skills. So what would you say in my position? You got it: ‘No.’”

I paused in front of her, thinking. This is not how my negotiation career ends. I had stared down terrorists; I wasn’t going to just leave.

“Come on,” I said. “There has to be something I can do.”

Amy shook her head and gave one of those ironic laughs that mean the person doesn’t think you’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell.

“I’ll tell you what. Yes, there is something you can do: volunteer at a suicide hotline. Then come talk to me. No guarantees, got it?” she said. “Now, seriously, go away”.

My conversation with Amy kicked my awareness of the complex and hidden subtleties of conversations, the power of certain words, the seemingly unintelligible emotional truths that so often underly intelligible exchanges.

A trap into which many fall is to take what other people say literally. I started to see that while people played the game of the conversation, it was in the game beneath the game, where few played, that all the leverage lived.

Pretending to be listening

The problem with the traditional advice on listening is that it serves to pretend that we are listening. Back to “Talk Lean”:

Much of the advice and training given to people about listening (typical examples include “Look at the speaker directly”, “Avoid being distracted”, “Smile and use other facial expressions”, “Adopt an open and inviting posture”, “Encourage the speaker to continue by saying things like ‘yes’ and ‘uh huh’”) could more accurately be described as advice on how to make the other person believe you are listening, rather on how to actually listen to them.

What is going on in place of effective listening? We are applying an emotional filter to what we hear and, instead of listening, we are already preparing a response - a response that usually turns out to be overly emotional and defensive - normal when we have missed all the nuances of what the other person has just said.

How can we remove the emotional filter and instead, retain and analyze all necessary elements that can lead us to a hidden “Yes”?

Listen with your hands

The advice is almost too simple to be credible. And yet it works. I have taken it from “Talk Lean” and have successfully applied it many times. It’s to TAKE NOTES. Differently. In your usual meeting, you write down your synthesis of what was said. Here, we need to take notes of what the other person actually says.

If you take notes like in a meeting, with bullet points or key ideas, you will write down what seems important for you. An emotional filter will kick in and you will miss the necessary nuances and context.

When you write down what the other person actually says, in her order and in her words, you will have higher chances to uncover what is important for the other person.

As a minimum, try to write down the other person’s first words.

For example, imagine the other person tells you “I have briefly looked through your résumé and I find your work experience very compelling, but at first glance, it looks like you do not have sufficient B2B experience and regional exposure. Moreover, officially we are on a hiring freeze till the end of the year.” If you have not written it down verbatim, you are likely to emotionally react to the part of the message that provoked strong negative emotions, such as “you do not have sufficient experience” and “hiring freeze”. If instead, you have managed to take notes of what the other person has actually said, you would pay attention to words like ‘briefly’, ‘very compelling’, ‘at first glance’, ‘officially’, ‘until the end of the year’. Maybe there is nothing substantial behind it, but maybe positively reacting and further exploiting these remarks can lead you to a hidden “yes”. To quote “Talk Lean” again,

Don’t just use your ears for listening - use your hands too.

And don’t just pretend to be listening - actually listen.

Illustration: Johee Yoon