WWDC 1997. Apple had just purchased Jobs’ NeXT, a play to use NeXTSTEP to replace the current MacOS. Jobs, dressed in his classic black turtleneck, sat on the stage alone, ready to talk directly to his audience after returning to Apple. He kicked off his session with a refreshingly casual opening: “What I want to do is just chat, so we get to spend 45 minutes or so together and I want to talk about whatever you want to talk about. I have opinions on most things so… I figured if you just wanted to start asking some questions, we’ll go to some good places.”

Net-net? Tell me what’s on your mind.

Communications is a Two Way Street

In communications, we focus on using messages to influence the behaviors and beliefs we are trying to drive. This includes crafting content with strategic timing in order to tell the stories we want, when we want to tell them, and to whom.

But as communicators, we must push ourselves to ask: is our audience ready to listen to this? And have we truly listened to our audience first? What do they need to hear vs. what do we want to say? And are we starting from that perspective for all of our communications?

Audience-centricity and even further, audience empathy, is easier said than done, especially when you are considering mass communications across a populous with different backgrounds, points of view, levels of understanding and more.

Unless you are a dog whisperer, I have some good news for you: your commonality across all populations is that they are all human, and they all have basic human needs, especially the need to be heard.

Standing Out by Shutting Up

Telling someone to be quiet is harsh. And not nice. But sometimes, the truth hurts, and this is one of those tough loves I’m going to dish - we all could benefit from not talking so much, and listening more. Listening is the most powerful communication tools you can apply. Being heard is one of the most fundamental psychological needs.

Research has found that listening leads to deeper empathy and understanding, greater conflict resolution and less sensitivity to power dynamics. In a study from MIT, for example, they found that creating opportunities for opposing groups to be heard was mutually beneficial. Anne Trafton writes, “In a questionnaire given before and after the interaction, attitudes toward the opposing group improved most among members of the disempowered group who told their own stories, and among members of the dominant group who read others’ stories...For the dominant group, the researchers believe that hearing the opposing group’s stories is beneficial because members of the group in power often fear being blamed for the conflict.”

Becoming a Better Listener

Similar to speaking skills, listening skills take work to grow and develop over time. David D. Burns, author of the famous cognitive behavior book Feeling Good, outlines three key listening skills to help you be a better communicator, whether you are communicating one-to-one or one-to-many similar to Jobs:

• Disarming

• Empathy

• Inquiry

Disarming

The disarming technique includes finding a truth in what the other person is saying, even if you do not agree, it seems unreasonable, or it seems unfair.

For example: if someone says, “I’m afraid of the dark.” A simple response can be, “You can’t see anything in the dark.”

Disarming is an important first step in developing listening skills. It’s hard to listen to someone if they do not feel comfortable in opening up to you. By deploying disarming techniques, you are creating a shared space of mutual understanding and empathy, which is encouraging for those to be vulnerable.

The disarming technique is interesting, because it is so counterintuitive to what we as human beings want to do when we are being attacked or insulted - we find a way to agree. Jobs again did this beautifully in WWDC 1997, when someone asked him about OpenDoc.

Of course, not all conversations are combative in nature, but the disarming technique is incredibly effective in both antagonistic and pleasant conversations. It all starts with establishing psychological safety.

Empathy

Once you use the disarming technique, the next step in developing effective listening skills in a conversation is to apply empathy. This means genuinely trying to understand the other person’s point of view, and identifying the blind spots in our purview of their life experiences. Demonstrating empathy includes two types:

• Thought empathy, in which you try to understand the thoughts the person is experiencing by paraphrasing. An example can include “You mentioned that you don’t like not being able to see in the dark.”

• Feeling empathy, in which you try to acknowledge how the person may be feeling. An example can include, “I can imagine that must be frightening and anxiety-provoking for you to be in a dark room at night.”

Inquiry

The last key in developing effective communications is to learn how to gently inquire so that you can further learn how a person is thinking or feeling. Therapists are notorious for their gentle inquiry (“how did that make you feel?”) but you can use inquiry in a variety of different ways, including “tell me more about that,” “what did you learn from that experience?” and “what’s the worst that can happen?” By using pointed inquiries, you can start to unpack how a person processes information and feelings, and truly develop empathy and deeper understanding for your audience.

Tl:dr: are you listening? How do you sharpen your listening skills?