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Be interested rather than Interesting

Have you ever met a person who is an amazing storyteller?  They told great jokes, they had traveled everywhere and it seemed as though they virtually knew something about everything?  But, you couldn’t get a word in edgewise!  Or worse, as soon as you shared a story, they had a similar story that was better than yours?  The old one-upper.  That person is always interesting and awesome to have at a party, but are they the person you truly connect with while you’re there?  Do you ever walk away from them, saying, “Wow, what a great conversationalist?”  Typically, no. 

There was a book published in 1937.  Many of you have heard of it, called “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie.  This is the 25^th best-selling book of all time in the world.  It’s really the grandfather of personal development, and one of the things that Carnegie talked about is everyone’s favorite subject is themselves. 

Carnegie said people don’t like to talk about me, me, me.  Instead, they want to talk about their life, their job, their kids, their spouse, their hobbies and passions.  People would rather talk about their vacation than your vacation, because that’s what they know more about. 

If we know that is what people want to talk about, help them to talk about those things.  As a result, it will create a stronger relationships and stronger rapport in business and in personal settings. 

Rather than telling you a bunch of techniques on how you can be a better listener, I’m going to give you an exercise to try so you can actually become aware of this and experience real listening. 

For this exercise, you will need a friend, spouse or co-worker who is interested in becoming a better listener as well.  You can’t force anybody to do this one.  Each of you is going to take a turn.  There are two 10-minute turns.  Each turn, one of you will be a listener and one of you will be a speaker.  The speaker’s job is simply to talk and not worry about what you’re saying, just to talk.  The listener’s job is to truly listen – no commentary, no judgment.  So the listener can’t say things like, “That’s good”, “That’s bad”, “I agree”, “I disagree”.  Anything like that is commentary.  Also, you can’t add any parallels, like “Oh that happened to me once” or “Oh I got a story just like that.”  The only thing the listener can do is listen and then ask clarifying questions, deepening questions, “Oh, tell me more about that”, “How did you feel when that happened?”, “Wow, that’s something that’s very powerful”,  Tell me more.” 

There’s a lot of things you can say to people that will allow them to dig deeper, and you may find, that even if you know this person very well, if you truly listen, just for ten minutes, that you might learn something you’ve never learned before.  You might hear something they’ve never said before and it can really strengthen a relationship. 

Now obviously we can’t do that everywhere we go in every situation.  The purpose of this exercise is to make you aware of what it feels like to truly listen and then start to incorporate that in pieces of your daily life. 

If you would like to learn more on the topic of listening to become a better communication, I have two book recommendations.

The first is the Dale Carnegie book.  If you haven’t read it yet, you should, it is “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” 

The other is a book by an author named Marshall Rosenberg called “Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life.” It is an amazing book on listening and communicating with other people. 

Be Free!

Tom Weber
VP of Sale

PS – Remember, “A brilliant conversationalist is one who talks to you about yourself.” - Lisa Kirk