I was on a webinar about the importance of volunteer leadership hosted by ASIS Women in Security and was reminded of one of my favorite quotes:

"You have two ears and one mouth. Use them proportionately."  --Unknown

It is pretty blunt, but so important.  When we are trying to advance and gain visibility, we focus on promoting our view first and speaking first to not miss an opportunity to make our stand known.  Speaking up is definitely a critical part of gaining visibility in a group, but listening can be even more powerful, especially in one-on-one conversations.  Most of our education from childhood to adulthood is about speaking.  Think about as a child, you learn to speak to communicate.  As you enter elementary school, we learn to write and then, in secondary school how to craft sentences to communicate what we want to say.  In college and in professional training forums, we learn how to speak publicly and how to engage andience.  All of this focus is on speaking , but very little education is devoted to listening, yet it is absolutely necessary to build rapport and forge relationships with individuals in our adulthood.

So here it a little education on listening.  There are three types of listening:  1)  Subjective 2) Objective 3) Empathetic, which is the best.  Subjective listening is listening with our own filter--our default assumption that our perspective is how the world really is and is the same of everyone else.   Subjective listening is usually the key ingredient for conflicts and yet, it is so natural because it is informed of our own individual experiences, culture, childhood, etc.  Unless we ask and listen to others' perspective, we are unaware of the subjectivity of our perception.  Objective listening is better because we are listening to the words of others and nothing else.  In this form, we take someone's words at face value, and we all know that what people say is not necessary what the do or mean.  So, finally, we have empathetic listening, and this form uses one's words, nonverbal cues, and our intution.  It is the type we use to hone our relational skills, really understand another's perspective and get to the bottom of miscommunication, conflicts or disagreements. 

Empathetic listening is first element of a tool I teach call LACOV, which is the word "vocal" spelled backwards.  I like it because it represents the opposite of what our natural default response is which is to speak first, then listen when listening first and speaking second is so much more effective. 

Action step:  Commit to listening first and speaking second for one day, and at the end of the day, assess if your conversations were more productive.  In most cases, I have found this to be true.

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I look forward to hearing from you.