Listening: An Exercise For Developing Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence, the combination of self-awareness, "other"-awareness, ability to recognize and regulate one's own emotions and interpersonal skills, is at the core the ability to listen. Listening Inwardly for our own assumptions, beliefs, and emotional reactions. Listening to what is being communicated to us. Checking it out to see if what we heard is actually what was expressed. Listening changes the world, because everything from medical errors and airplane disasters to knowing the real problems of our staff or how to help a child do better in school turns upon our ability to grasp the whole story in order to act effectively.
Here is a simple "learning to listen" exercise: Participants choose a partner and each pair finds a spot in the room where they can face one another.
Step One: For one minute each person shares on a simple topic, e.g. how they feel about shopping malls, talking at the same time as the other person. The idea is to share a point of view while trying to listen to that of someone else.
Step Two: Each partner shares their opinion one sentence at a time without relating to the other person, e.g.:

Partner 1: Shopping malls have everything you need in one place.

Partner 2: Shopping malls are energy hogs.

Partner 1: If I want to go to Sears, or Macy's or my kids need something, it's all right there.

Partner 2: They waste space and are bad for the environment.

Partner 1: And you can go to lunch or the movies right there.

Partner 2: Shopping malls are the devil.

This continues for 90 seconds.

Step Three: Each partners shares their opinion one sentence at a time, and the partner responds by paraphrasing the sentence without using any of the same words, starting with "So what you're saying is..."

Partner 1: Some of my best memories with my kids have taken place in shopping malls.

Partner 2: So what you're saying is that there are happy times you like to think about and that many of them occurred in places where stores are all inside one big building surrounding by a huge parking lot.

If partner 1 says "yes, that's what I said," then partner 2 shares a sentece and partner 1 paraphrases.

Some questions for processing this exercise:
What was it like to try to listen to someone else at the same time as you were talking?

Can you think of times when you are trying to listen to another person while your own thoughts are racing?

What was it like to share without your partner responding to what you said?

What was it like to paraphrase what your partner said?

What gets in the way of representing what the person was saying?
Were you aware of your own bias, judgements or perceptions interfering with simply re-stating their point?

Since we live in inter-connected world that is hyperactive when it comes to communication, we need to develop thinking skills that make us better at relationships. Simply setting aside our own assumptions for the time it takes to absorb another person's thoughts and feelings slows down our own emotional reactivity, but most importantly it is a way to stay grounded in what is really happening, not what we expected, want or believe should happen. This is the foundation of trust upon which all relationships are built. As Peter Drucker writes in "Managing Yourself" in Harvard Business Review, "Organizations are no longer built on force but on trust. The existence of trust between people does not necessarily mean that they like one another. It means that they understand one another. Taking responsibility for relationships is therefore an absolute necessity."