Sam Dailey (Master Active Listening)
Sam is a certified Growth Mode Coach and Finance and Technology expert, passionate about helping professionals find balance and joy in their careers. Drawing on his extensive exper...
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What is self-centered listening?
Self-centered listening is when we're listening for ourselves, we're listening so we can respond, we can assert our own viewpoint. When you're in this mode of listening, you're interrupting people frequently and you're driving the conversation back to topics that you are interested in.
Why Is Listening to Yourself Important?
Let's start with listening to yourself. Listening to yourself can be a difficult thing to listen to yourself. You need quiet time and you need distraction free time. I encourage everyone if they want to increase their emotional awareness to develop a practise that they can do each day to help them listen to themselves. This practise could be something like a seeded meditation, but it doesn't need to be that formal. You can do it while you're doing the dishes, while you're going for a walk. The key is not to have any distractions. Do something when you're not listening to music or a podcast. Listen to yourself. Taking time to listen to yourself as the best practise that you can do to help increase your emotional awareness. You are your own best teacher and you know yourself best.
What Makes Listening to Others Challenging?
There are two primary areas where people get hung up when they're practising listening to others. The first is that they give advice too early in a conversation. When you give advice, you're really interrupting someone else's flow of thoughts in their own discovery of their emotions and their ideas and their thoughts. So try to practise not giving advice until either someone asks for it until the very end of a conversation. When you find yourself tempted to give advice, see if you can ask one, two, or even three more questions to help the other person explore for themselves before you jump in with advice. The other way that we interrupt our listening to others is with judgement of others. This is a really common one, and it's the ultimate enemy of having emotional awareness. When we judge others, we think that they're less than us. We usually judge them as being incompetent or irrational or mean. And the problem with this is that no one thinks of themselves in any of those ways. So when we listen to others with judgement , we're really not listening to them as they see themselves and we're really not listening at all.