WHOLE BODY ACTIVE LISTENING
Active listening is the act of giving the entire attention of your mind, body and heart to what others say. This is a skill that highly developed and successful leaders learn and cultivate. It takes concentration, patience, and confidence.
Influence is not about just choosing the right words, it’s listening with the right energy. Words are only one tool of communication – and, as far as honesty and clarity go, not the most revealing and reliable. We can manipulate words to do anything we want them to do and spend much of our verbal energy on covering the truth. This doesn’t mean that we go around lying all the time, but in the interest of being polite, politic, or of protecting against invasive people, we all will often use words to skirt the truth. IF you’ve ever felt ill and haven’t wanted to talk about it, you will answer “Fine” when asked how you are. If someone asks you your opinion of their presentation, which may have been sub-par, you may answer, “I thought it was great,” in order to keep the peace and on and on.
The truth, however, is always in the body language and behind the eyes. A psychologist friend of mine has a way of getting to the bottom of what a client is feeling when he suspects the client is covering the truth with their words. He says something that surprises the client into silence and looks int their eyes and notes body positioning changes. He then can see the truth about what the person is feeling.
When we are spoken to, we take in the information through three sense gates: the body, the limbic center of the brain (what we commonly call the heart) and the thinking mind. Listening with a high degree of awareness of how our body and heart feel allows us to not only to hear the words but feel the emotion behind them. This is a hallmark of great listening and insightful response.
In order to listen with sort of whole-body intensity, it’s necessary to empty our minds and bodies of anything that is blocking our attention to the other person. Breathe deeply and allow your mind to calm. Relax the body of any tension or holding that you might be bringing into the exchange – give into gravity and just allow the body to be, without straining. As the person is speaking, continue to breathe evenly. Alternate between inhaling into the gut and the chest. Exhale slowly. This keeps the mind focused on the present moment and centers the body and heart for maximum receptivity. You are creating a spaciousness in your body, heart and mind and can now feel the intellectual and emotional content of their speech.
Active listening increases the weight of your presence as well. When I coach on executive presence what we find is that you get people’s attention by what you say, but you hold people’s attention and gain their respect by how you treat them when they are speaking. When you make the effort to open yourself up and listen actively and deeply, you establish a charismatic presence that speaks to your confidence as a leader. Most people are the “I speak therefore I am” variety, but a true leader knows that active, multi-dimensional listening contains power that speech cannot approach. You are not like most of the others, jumping in to speak because they feel they will disappear if they’re silent. You know that when you do speak, it will be informed by all the intellectual and emotional information that you have gleaned from your active listening. Others may speak more, but active listeners speak concisely, powerfully, deeply and memorably.active listening. Others may speak more, but active listeners speak concisely, powerfully, deeply and memorably.