Listening skills include many crucial processes such as offering feedback and paraphrasing that are covered in my Virtual Workshop Series, Leadership Communication™. To be an emotionally intelligent listener, I also recommend that you be intentional at asking for certain types of information. Generally these fall into 4 types.

1. Content – What is the other person saying about actions, beliefs, etc.? How do they describe them? How do they evaluate them?

What others say may trigger an adverse reaction from you if you strongly disagree. Unfortunately, what you may do then is to stop listening. You may start to calculate where the other person is wrong and how to formulate your rebuttal. Or you may decide to go passive and mentally just drop out of the conversation. This lack of good listening can do you harm. It is better to pause in the midst of your negative reaction and decide to go back to listening. Remind yourself to stay tuned in so that you can at least know clearly what they are saying. Ask follow up questions to get the facts straight.

2. What are their emotions?

To be an emotionally intelligent listener, you need to listen between the lines of content to hear the emotions that may lie beneath the spoken word. If you want to be able to read people better, this is a crucial step. Give it some mental energy and time. Guess what they may be feeling such as anger or frustration.

You may ask them what they are feeling, but usually they will reply with a thought. “I feel that John should do X.” It is better to guess at their feeling and put that guess into a question. “It sounds like you are angry at John. Is that right?” When you verbalize their emotion, you can help them get clear about it and talk about it.

3. What are their needs/values?

Ask, “What is important to you about this?” Or ask, “What really matters to you?” Few people understand how valuable this step is. If you can listen deeply to their needs and values, you can often see what you need to do about this problem. And you can learn how urgent it is to them to get a solution.

4. What requests do they make?

What would they like to see happen? Ask them to make this specific. You can help them to boil down their general dislike of something into a specific request for action. Then follow up with a question such as, “What would that look like?” to sharpen the focus.

In summary, Have an agenda of what to listen for, the above 4 items. Then your listening goal is to ask good questions to get at these items.

Listening skills is one full Module of 4 sessions of my Virtual Workshop Series, Leadership Communication™.