Archive for December, 2011
What I Learned in 2011
As 2011 comes to an end, we’ve been thinking of all the wonderful people we met, worked and thought along with in person and online. I received an email that said, “So, Listening Lady, what did you learn this year?” A very provocative question.
Here’s my answer:
- Listening is like a muscle that needs constant attention to build its strength and agility.
- Master listeners inquire five times more than they advocate.
- Our brains, bodies and emotions create the listening habits we rely on.
- The highest paid people are often described as being good listeners.
- The Golden Rule doesn’t apply to listening. Instead it might better be stated: Listen to Others as They Want to Be Heard.
May the coming year bring renewed energy to do what matters most to you in life and tremendous satisfaction for your contributions.
With best wishes,
Marian Thier and our Listening Impact Team
Keep in touch, and add your listening learning of 2011 to this list.
Listening Tips for Sales People
My colleagues, Lyman K. Steil and Richard K. Bommelje, who are long-time pioneers in the listening world, cited the following two quotes in their Listening Leaders Newsletter. The quotes inspired me to write a post about them.
Forget about the sales you want to make and concentrate on the service you want to render ~ Harry Bullis
Make it easy for your customers to talk to you ~ Kevin Stirtz
The quotes made me recall a time when I was hired to coach Tina, a sales professional. She was recruited from a pharmaceutical company where she had a very good track record to this medical devices company where she was having a tough time.
Tina’s new company hired me to observe and coach her. They didn’t want Tina to become discouraged, had invested a lot to bring her on board, feared losing sales, but didn’t know what the problem was. Tina was glad to have a coach and not at all defensive about what I might see in her performance.
We agreed that I needed to see her in action, so we scheduled two half days for me to ride along with her on sales calls. On the way to the first customer I asked Tina what she liked about her last job and what she thought contributed to her great success there. She had no trouble answering:
- Trustworthy products
- Good customer relationships
- Supportive leadership
- Well-designed sales training
- Easy-to-use software
Before I had a chance to ask her to rate the new job on those criteria, we arrived at the first customer’s site, a large private clinic. Tina had forewarned the client, Mika, about my presence, so he was not at all surprised see me. He even said, “I’d sure like it if my management thought enough about me to hire a performance coach. Maybe they see me as a hopeless case.” Mika chuckled at that last remark, so I knew he wasn’t threatened.
Tina started the conversation with Mika by questioning him about how business was going and new developments since they last met. Mika responded with superficial answers and Tina got stuck. She didn’t seem to know where to venture next with Mika. She made a nice connection between one of his points and an updated feature on a leased machine. He was interested and asked some technical questions about the feature. Tina answered, Mika said he had to run, and we left.
When we got back into her car, Tina was upset, “I came here intending to sell him another device, but there wasn’t time. Bummer. Where did I mess up?”
“What would you have done if this was one of your old clients at your other company?”
“We’d have talked about his kids or golf game or vacation. You know, something personal. Then I’d have asked something specific about his challenges or handed him some research that I’m pretty sure he’d be interested in. But, I don’t know this guy well enough to make small talk. And you saw, he only gives reps a few minutes.”
“What do you guess he thinks about you?”
“All business. New kid. I don’t know, doubt he thinks much about me—another vendor.”
While driving from one client to the next Tina and I talked about changing her mode from being a salesperson to being a serviceperson. We practiced opening conversations, increasing inquiry, identifying pain, paraphrasing and listening a whole lot.
Tina grew more skilled and confident with each client visit. I tried to boil down my coaching suggestions to very simple and clear ones for her to practice: Use the time to learn about the person and the business. Refrain from trying to sell anything.
“You know, Marian, this is Sales 101, but I forgot it. I was so anxious to prove that I could sell their products and make them feel they’d made a wise choice bringing me on board, that I ignored how I built relationships in my old company. My new mantras are ‘Serve, Don’t Sell. Listen More than I Talk.’
Rarely is there such a fast turnaround. Tina and I only met six times over two months before we agreed she no longer needed a coach. Once she was able to live her mantras, her words and tone-of-voice were that of a caring person, and her focus was on the client.
Not surprisingly, Mika no longer rushes out of meetings with Tina. He’s not much for talking about himself, but he does like to brainstorm with Tina about things that are going on in the clinic that could use some fresh eyes. She serves, customers buys.
Reviews of “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain”
Following are some reviews about Incognito, The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman, Pantheon Books, New York, 2011. I highly recommend it.
This book argues the following ideas and more:
- Your conscious mind is the “tip of the iceberg” and the rest of the iceberg (your brain) is what is really running the show
- The vast majority of your brain’s processing which leads to what you do and what you think is not accessible to your conscious mind
- Your brain contains many modules that overlap and compete as rivals
- “You” are your biology, but you can’t be understood by simple reductionism
- You have little if any “free will” and what that means
- Your neurobiology is a result of a constant interplay of genes and environment
One of the more intriguing facts revealed in this book is that one part of the brain invents stories to justify what another part sees or feels. Our brains constantly look for order and reason, even when there is none, leading us to regularly reach erroneous conclusions.
Bee
…extremely well documented, exploring the limits of sensory perception, the learning that is automatic and burnt into our circuits
Jo Ryan
Incognito is a book of answers and a book of questions. We learn that 15% of women have four color receptors, not three like the rest of us. These tetra chromatic women actually see colors that others can’t. Then again because of the variations in our individual brains, reality can be subjective. When we look at something red, are we seeing the same thing? Are our perceptions of size, color, and light universally the same?
According to Eagleman our brain constructs our reality. We may think that we’ve just had a brilliant inspiration, but our subconscious had already come to the realization minutes before sharing it with our conscious mind.
Spudman
An example: “Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot” (pg 4).
Each one of us is much more than what we can ever think – it is amazing that we are aware only of a very small part of our brain. All of us strongly believe that we are in control of ourselves (at least most of the time) and so responsible for our actions. However our conscious self is more like the CEO of a large company that coordinates and supposedly directs the various divisions. The CEO may set the goals for the company, but he gets only a summary view of the situation and is seldom aware of the details. Similarly different sections of the brain work more or less independently – some through hard wired circuits that evolved over millions of years and others through culture and habits. We believe we are in charge but we are actually driven by what our brain (or more importantly different parts of our brain) perceives and tells us – surprisingly including what we see!
Sam Santhosh
Fascinating take aways?
- Implicit Egotism – Why we tend to mate with people who remind us of ourselves.
- Illusion of Truth Effect – We are more likely to believe a statement we have heard before…even when originally told the statement is false.
- Subliminal priming of beer paired with an image of a woman causes her to be seen as more attractive.
- Multiple memories are “recorded” for some of life’s events.
Kevin Hogan
Do Women Talk More than Men? Recent Research
The findings from Queendom.com, a testing company, indicate:
- women and older age groups tend to be better listeners
- a fair amount of people continue to practice listening “faux pas” like interrupting, finishing other people’s sentences, and otherwise not giving someone their undivided attention
- women can tell when someone isn’t listening. They recognize that distant, glassy look, the misplaced “Uh huhs,” and fidgeting
“Most people will probably state that they’re pretty good listeners, but that’s because a lot of us think that listening is a passive process – that it just requires us to hear what others are saying,” explains Dr. Ilona Jerabek, president of the company. “Listening is active. We need to be mentally present, which means avoiding distractions, refrain from prematurely judging what the speaker is saying, or focusing on coming up with the perfect comment. We also need to be physically present – this means eye contact and open body language – and no fidgeting!”
Women seem to grasp this active listening concept slightly better than men do. Women are not only a little better at using body language to show that they are listening, they were also more likely to let a conversation flow rather than interrupt a speaker. Age comparisons reveal that older age groups are not only better listeners and good with body language, but also have longer attention span, are more likely to hear a person out, and less likely to get distracted.
Queendom’s data also reveals that while listening to others…
3% admitted that they don’t make eye contact.
12% will finish someone’s sentences.
16% will correct the speaker if they mispronounce a word.
17% have a tendency to interrupt.
19% will purposely divert or end conversations that don’t interest them.
20% admit that they perform other tasks at the same time (e.g. watch TV, cook).
23% fidget (play with hair, look at watch, tap feet, drum fingers).
27% make disapproving faces if they don’t agree with the speaker.
31% are thinking about how they will respond to the speaker.
40% admit that their mind wanders if they find the topic of conversation boring.
“Our study also showed that people with good listening skills had better grades in school and higher performance ratings at work. Listening takes effort, however, and a willingness to give our undivided focused to someone, which isn’t always easy.”
For further information about the study:
Ilona Jerabek, Ph.D., President PsychTests AIM Inc. http://testyourself.psychtests.com/ [email protected] tel: 514-745-3189