Common Listening Mistakes to Avoid

So how do you use verbal cues to let someone know you're listening to them, you're respecting them, you care about it? Well, sometimes it's as simple as, huh, huh. Now, that doesn't sound articulate. If you wrote that down. U h? U h. Doesn't seem like you're that intelligent. But in the moment, when you're having a conversation with someone, when you're in a meeting with someone, the simple, uh, aha is letting them know I'm listening to you. It's letting them know I'm not off daydreaming about where am I going to go out to dinner tonight? What's going to happen for fun this weekend? No, I'm here with you. The actual aha. As a starting point, you can also say things like, yes, I get it. Now. The number one way you can really use verbal signals to let someone know you're listening is to summarize, say to them, let me make sure I get this. What you're saying is, and then you summarize in your own words. I don't mean you try to play it back like a court stenographer using word for word. The same thing. If they talked for five minutes, I don't want you to try to summarize it and do it verbatim for five minutes. That would be tedious and annoying. But if someone has talked to you for several minutes, you can say, let me make sure I'm really getting this. What you're saying is. And then maybe in 10 or 15 seconds, you use your words to summarize. And then at the end of it, say, am I understanding you correctly? If you want to be more successful, then improve your communication skills. The best way to do that, smash the subscribe button right now. Because now the person genuinely understands you're trying to listen to them. They hear your words coming out of their mouth. And if they hear you summarizing their point, it's going to make them feel good. It's going to make them feel like they had an impact. It's going to make them feel like you truly respected them. We live in a world where everybody wants attention. You've heard it said, this is an attention economy. So many people feel ignored, they feel silenced. Even when they're able to speak, they feel like family, friends, nobody's listening to them. So when you listen to someone, you're showing them tremendous respect. Quite often they will like you just for the fact that you are listening to them. But by verbally summarizing what they said, demonstrating you're actively trying to get what they're saying, it has a much more powerful impact. Now, they don't have to wonder whether you're listening. They have 100% empirical evidence, because your summary of what they just said is going to verbally confirm that you are listening. Another thing you can do verbally is ask questions, really listen to them. The problem with so many people, whether they're talking one on one with a colleague or they're in a meeting with three or four colleagues, is you're spending all their time thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, hurry up and finish your stuff, because I want to say my stuff. Everyone's thinking about their agenda. Everybody's guilty. I'm guilty of that. Sometimes, and therefore quite often, people don't feel listened to because you're not actually being listened to, because the person you're talking to is thinking about what they're going to say next. If you stop to ask a question about what someone just said, you're interrupting this pattern. You're letting the person know that you're really listening to them. You're letting the person know that you're genuinely trying to understand what they're saying, and you're helping them communicate more effectively because your question might spotlight some flaw in their presentation, a gap in how they're trying to convey their idea. So asking questions politely, and you can do this by saying, apologies for interrupting, but I really want to make sure I'm getting this just right. Did you mean. And then ask your question. And it's got to be a real question, not a rhetorical question, to make yourself look smart and then look dumb. Not just a question pointing out some inconsistency, but a question that shows you're genuinely trying to understand at a deeper level, level their point. If you do these things, then you're going to send a very strong signal to the person you're speaking to, whether it's a colleague, whether it's a boss, whether it's someone who works for you, whether it's an investor, a prospect, a client, someone interviewing you for a job. You're going to send a very strong signal to them, not just visually, but orally, that you are listening. And they're going to love that.