Can You Hear Me Now?

from the desk of Ron Sukenick

I have a theory about failure. Whether we're talking about failure in business or the failure of a relationship, I think it all comes back to someone's failure to listen. In my book The Power is in the Connection, my co-author Jane Surges and I explain that failure to listen occurs whenever the receiver "tunes out" the sender before receiving, and understanding, the entire message. We tend to listen only to what we want to hear, don't we?

Since so much of our success, both in our business lives and in our personal relationships, depends on our listening skills, I teach the importance of listening three times as much as we speak. Purposeful listening means committing yourself to "being in the moment" with that other person. Next, purposeful listening involves asking questions to clarify the intention of the other person. Finally, I advise, to complete the listening "transaction", state in our own words what you think you heard, asking "Is that it?" or "Do I have it right?"

My friend Rhoda Israelov writes a blog about business blogging. Knowing that I teach purposeful listening, she called my attention to a blog post of hers called "Ties That Tell The Truth In Blogging", recalling the old children's game of Telephone. The way we both remember the game, we children would be seated in a row, and the first child would be given a phrase or sentence to whisper to the next child, and so on down the line. The object of the game was for the last child to be able to repeat the message exactly as the first had whispered it. Of course, as Rhoda points out, that almost never happened. By the time the message had traveled down the line, it had become distorted and misunderstood.

When we listen with purpose, making a concerted effort to truly understand what the other person is trying to say to us, and only when we do that, we move Beyond Networking. Listening that way has the power to transform an ordinary conversation into a real connection.