Your problem is you just don't flaming well listen!

I'll bet you have had that said to you.  If not, you probably don't listen!

How unfair.  How hurtful.  How I feel that on the inside and sense my anger hormones cooking up a good explosive stew.  Or maybe its true, the sports were just that much more compelling than voices off.

Of course you listen.  But to what?  And with what level of understanding?

The real problem is that so much information is present, our busy brains choose what to hear and what to ignore and most of the time this is an unconscious, and habitual process.  Without training, what is heard is pretty random stuff, ranging from noises off stage, to the inner voice arguing with what is being said, and all places in between.  Not much space is left for ascertaining meaning.  A whole profession of diplomacy has arisen to fill the gap where this might lead to war.

After non-judgement (which gets your opinions to quieten down giving you a chance to hear without interference), the next core skill of the coach is listening.  Some call it active listening.  I use intuitive listening, full attention listening, process listening, analytic listening, and, always listening with feedback.

In this post, I am going to try to get you started with listening skills.

First some headlines and then one bit of detail and some guidance....to get good at this you will really need to practice a lot.  I mean like as much as you might do with your favourite hobby or your profession!  A lot of a lot.

Here are some things from NLP texts and other sources to think about:

In the language:

Sensory frame

• Feelings - "I feel bad", can also be eating, "you want me to swallow that hook, line and sinker?" 
• Seeing - "I cannot see this working"
• Hearing - "That doesn't sound good to me"
• Think - "I can't process this right now"
• Tasting - "This leaves a bad taste in the mouth", or "Sweet!"
• Smell - "I smell a rat!"

Grammatical Distortion

• Deletion - "that really hurts me" What hurts and how it does it are deleted.
• Universals - "you will never change" An unlikely absolute!
• Nominalisation - "this relationship is not working." A relationship is a verb, not a thing, the way we are relating can be changed.
• Cause effect confusion - "When you look that way you make me mad."  Somehow pressing buttons on your insides...how exactly?
• Complex equivalence - "the way you looked when you said that tells me I just cannot trust what you say."  Maps unconnected things together - how can you tell what the look meant?
• Mind reading - "I know what you are thinking." Huh? You're reading my mind?
• Pre-supposition - "I know you won't like this."  Huh? You read my mind without me even speaking?
• Complex words - "I love you."  For me, a tidy house!  For you, candles at dinner.  Different meanings for the same word, kind of a mix of several of the above.

Conversational process

• Repetition - looping around an issue
• No pausing to check understanding
• Interruptions with "what I think"
• Dominant, submissive, indifferent
• Content transaction analysis - parent like, child like
• Logic, emotive, irrational
• Flowing or interrupted
• Ordered or jumping around
• Past, present and future orientation
• Use of method - metaphor, story
• Towards/away from orientation
• Validation - how do I know its right - inside? Others say so? Bit of both?
• Attention on self or others 
• "Modal" influence - obligations or possibilities, needs or wants?
• Big picture, details, bit of both
• Stressors - people, emotions, things, choices?
• Etc!!!

In the body

Sub-modalities

• Tone of voice
• Pitch, speed, volume
• "Colour" in the words themselves, e.g. level of descriptive or type of descriptive
• Changes in these

Physical features (more Eckman and psychology than NLP)

• Skin colour, showing emotion shift
• Eyes in particular for tells of emotion
• Eye direction (may show recall, creation, shame etc)
• Blink rate
• Breathing rate, big changes e.g. sigh, holding breath, very low breath, panting.
• Emblems (accidental emphasis, e.g. forms a fist)
• Changes in manipulators (e.g. rubbing an ear or cheek) or gesticulation
• Satir poses (blamer, placater, distractor, leveller, calculator body postures)
• Micro expressions and related non-facial physical movements (tension, relaxation)
• Crying, laughing
• Gross movement (very still, to walking around while talking)

In all of the above pick up on changes or on signs that conflict with each other.  Saying "I am very happy about this" said with a look of fear, a flash of red on the cheek or neck, and an increase in manipulators tells at least two stories at once. Both may be true but probably for different reasons.

In the atmosphere

Intuitive responses to your client, what do you sense or pick up?  In the way a yawn is contagious if you have rapport you may well sense something they are feeling:

• Fear
• Stress/tension
• Other emotions
• Rapport
• Sense of time
• Attention intensity - close up, hear the traffic outside?

It is impossible to pick up on all these and the many other factors that may be present.  With a bit of practice you might notice some of them, and they will tell you a lot.

If, as a coach, you are going to pick up the information you need, it is essential to "tune in" to the session and use your whole presence to pay close attention to the client's meaning.

Remember, your client will rarely really know their own meaning.  They probably come with a series of relatively unformed thoughts and related feelings that they wish to resolve.   Often after sessions with my coach, I have also gone out without knowing how or what has changed, just feeling a lot better.  I have learned to accept this too as a good outcome.  Understanding you are too stressed doesn't make you less stressed.  Understanding can be over-rated!

The most important thing as you start is to take time, to pause and reflect back to your client what you think you have understood and check your understanding.  This allows them to elaborate, correct or confirm and you can move ahead.  When checking, check all around - is this what you think, is this what it feels like for you, is this what the past present and future consequences are?  Is this what you want to speak out loud to me?

As your skills as a listener develop, your active involvement in the process will increase and intuition (the quick feedback of learned skills when they are needed) will improve.  But being listened to alone without any intervention or guidance is also a blessing rarely bestowed and a good place to start.

I'll come back to each of these areas in a bit more detail in later posts, and also cover some of the useful assumptions that you can make, straight out of neuro-linguistic programming, that may well help you be a more effective listener.

One of my favourites is confusingly called by Bodenhamer and Hall in their "Users manual to the Brain" selective restrictional violation and refers to a habit of conferring  human intention on inanimate things.   A great example is the comment "oh, those chocolate biscuits are calling to me!" used to weird effect in a recent chocolate bar ad.

Well, there you go, I can hear the Shiraz in the kitchen telling me to get a life, and a glass, so that's all for now.  Post up your experiences of deeper meaning below the shallow surface of communication and I'll come back with more detail in the next week or so on some of these ideas.

One final comment before the glass of wine.  Do you think it is ever possible to listen and understand without changing the meaning of what has been said?  A so called "clean process"?  Read the above, abbreviated, list of half-noticed features of communication again, check how many apply to your own communication and whether you have much control over them, and then answer my question.