The 2 Cardinal Sins of Active Listening and How to Overcome Them

Learn to reap the benefits of being known as a good listener

Image credit: Jopwell

Being a good listener is important. There seems to be nearly unanimous agreement on that. And yet, many of us continue to fail at becoming good listeners. Why is that?

I have found that there are 2 primary barriers when it comes to better listening:

• sins of omission — you simply miss stuff because you weren’t paying attention, or not fully invested in the conversation.
• sins of misinterpretation — you may have heard everything, but you interpreted it incorrectly.

Both of these sins are the result of poor motives — just different kinds of poor motives.

We’re usually inattentive because we’ve lost interest in the person or the topic of conversation. So avoiding this is all about getting better at keeping an interest in what the other person is saying.

We usually misinterpret things — or hear what we want to hear or fear we’d hear — because we’re smuggling our own baggage into the conversation. Like the craftsman with a new hammer, every conversation tends to look like a nail — even when it’s nowhere close to being one. But unlike the problem of being attentive, this one can’t be solved by honing your interest in what someone is saying. I requires a different approach.

The great news is that both of these sins of bad listening can be avoided by some fairly simple adjustments.

Get Interested In More Things

You’ll always be more attentive to someone when they’re talking about something you were already interested in. You also won’t have to strain yourself to add something appropriate to the conversation.

So get interested in more things! Find a way to really enjoy learning about something new. No need to get obsessed and look to master a bunch of things. Just get good at getting a basic understanding of a whole bunch of different things.

After a while, it will become a habit. And you’ll find yourself going into each conversation asking what can I learn?

Lean on the 6 Degrees

Have you ever heard of the game “The 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon?” Long story short: Kevin Bacon is an American actor who has been in so many films with so many people, 2 college students created a game around it. The challenge of the game is to name anyone and see if it takes more than 6 steps to get from them to Kevin Bacon.

I’ve found that as a way to get interested in someone else or what they’re saying, remember that you’re probably not more than 6 degrees away from them. Or some topic they like is no more than 6 connections away from one you like.

You Don’t Need to Know Much, Just Be Aware

A result of getting interested in and learning about more things is that you’ll have built a rich foundation of background knowledge. I won’t even say knowledge — it’s more like awareness.

Being aware of something is actually more useful for having good conversations than being knolwedgable. If you know something, there’s not much for the other person to tell you.

But if you’re just aware, and have a lot to learn, the other person in the conversation becomes a teacher. And boom! You’re the attentive student.

So make a habit of surfing the web and picking up just enough knowledge to be aware of a lot of different things. Then when you bump into someone who can elaborate, you get them engaged, and you’re likely to be more engaged.

Look for Adjectives and Adverbs

A classic piece of advice for better listening is to ask more questions. But in practice, that can be very difficult — especially if you’re not already engaged in the conversation.

So here’s a quick and dirty tip: listen for adjectives and adverbs. They’re the words that people use to describe people, places, things, or the way action happened. When someone says that the other person was “lazily wading through the day” — ask what they mean by “lazily”. You’re likely to get some elaboration.

If you pick random descriptive words that someone uses during a conversation, and hint that you’d like some elaboration, you’ll become much more engaged. And that leads to more active listening.

When All Else Fails, Simply Be There

There may be times when a conversation just doesn’t fall into the category of things you’re already interested in. It may be a conversation where someone you care about is venting to you, or just thinking out loud. Or conversations like that, it’s enough to simply be fully present — such that the other person can sense that.

But even that can be tricky. Our mind tend to want to take us other places. We think about what we need to do tomorrow, what we’d like for dinner, or various other things.

I’ve found that it helps to use a little mantra to keep myself present. When I sense myself getting carried away by other thoughts, I repeat the mantra, I’m here; not anywhere else.

Another thing that helps is to silently repeat to yourself a word or two from each of the speaker’s sentences. Just do this when you feel like your attention might be drifting away. You’d be surprised how well this can work.