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Get people to listen by starting with them

Three strategies for everyday conversation: listen with your heart, speak in pictures, and let your actions carry the message.

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01 The problem

Four barriers, not one bad listener

When a conversation fails, the easy explanation is that the other person was not paying attention. This book names four specific places where communication actually breaks, and only one of them is about attention.

Semantic barriers are about words: they hear you, but they do not share your meaning. Physical barriers are interruptions and distractions. Process barriers can appear in any role player, which means the speaker, the listener, the message, the meaning or the feedback. Psychosocial barriers are cultural background, personal bias, past experience and perception.

Naming the barrier matters, because each one has a different repair. The three strategies in the rest of the book exist to bring these four down.

02 The core idea

Communication is shared meaning, not transmission

The word comes from the Latin communis, meaning common. Communication is the process of building a common understanding, which makes it a form of sharing rather than an act of sending.

Five role players make it work: the speaker, the listener, the message, the meaning the listener takes from it, and the feedback that comes back. Every one is necessary, and a failure in any of them is a process barrier.

This is why the book calls communication relational. The jokes only your family gets, the codes only your closest friend understands: that is shared meaning in its simplest form. How satisfied you feel in your relationships tracks how much of it you have built.

03 Strategy one  ·  listening

Listen with your heart before you ask to be heard

If you want to be listened to, listen first. Listening with your heart means setting yourself and your own convenience aside and giving the other person all of your attention.

The book gives it as a sequence. Forget what is convenient for you. Offer a time that suits them. Turn the phone off and move any expected interruption before or after. Invite the person in, and if they look suspicious, simply tell them you are all ears and mean it. Then stop talking, sit still, and let them finish.

What makes it work is sincerity, shown through honesty, straightforwardness and authenticity. Sincerity is what earns trust, and trust is what makes someone willing to hear you when your turn comes. You are not in a controlled study, so it does not have to be perfect. Relax, and try again next time.

I have never known a human being who can be as still as Nelson Mandela. When he is sitting or listening, he does not tap his fingers or his foot, or move about.Richard Stengel, Mandela's Way

04 Strategy two  ·  speaking

Become a visual speaker: paint the picture in their world

Visual has nothing to do with slides, clothes or gestures here. It means choosing words so that a picture forms in the listener's mind, and choosing that picture from their life rather than from yours.

There are two layers. The surface layer is description, painting with words, and storytelling most of all. A good story makes the listener a co-creator of the meaning, which is why we accept it so easily. The interior layer is insight: seeing your listener's background, biases, experience and perceptions, then telling the story from there.

Jesus of Nazareth is the book's model for this. He built his teaching out of bread, vines, lamps, lost coins and lost sheep, images every listener already knew. He asked people questions and spent his days with ordinary people, which is how he knew which images would land.

In general, a person will only pay close attention to things which directly concern them.Hugh Mackay, Why Don't People Listen?

05 Strategy three  ·  doing

Let the doing carry the message

Once you have listened and spoken, there is one move left: say it by doing it. Thoughtful action saves you from repeating yourself, and it builds shared meaning that needs no words at all.

The everyday version is small. Your partner understands why the daily medication matters and still leaves the pill box full by Wednesday. Instead of saying it again, hand them the pill and a glass of water with a smile. The action says that you care, and nobody has to win an argument.

The larger version is to become the message. Choose one thing connected to what you believe and do it well, every day, without needing anyone to react to it. Mother Teresa's message was how she lived, and people listened to a life rather than to a speech.

Find your own Calcutta.Mother Teresa

06 The foundation

Calmness is both the cause and the effect

The three strategies rest on one quiet habit. Calmness here means patience: patience with yourself while you learn, and patience with other people while they adjust to the version of you that is changing.

Calm makes each strategy possible. It is easier to open your heart and listen when you are not braced for an argument. It is easier to choose your descriptions and work out your insight before you speak. It is easier to notice when an action would say more than another round of words.

It also returns the other way. When your everyday communication starts working, it hands you back a sense of calm, and the whole thing keeps itself turning. The book chose the everyday on purpose. Ordinary days are what a life is made of, and they are where all of this is practised.

07 The whole book

Three strategies, one shared meaning

None of the three stands alone. Listening earns you the right to speak, speaking well earns you attention, and doing turns the message into something people can see for themselves.

All three ask the same thing of you: stop starting from your own needs, and start from theirs. That is what makes people listen.

Adapted from Three Highly Effective Communication Strategies According To My Research
Gian Pittard  ·  © 2022 DVFZ Training Consultancy Services  ·  37 cited sources in the source edition