As paradoxical as it may seem, to be a good conversationalist, you need to be able to listen. And don't think it's that simple. Effective listening needs to be learned—psychologically adjusted accordingly, know the theory, and practice skills. Listening is a kind of art.
To understand whether you know how to listen, we will look at options for how you can listen, and then consider recommendations that will help you learn to listen.
Use the thesis - argument - evidence scheme
It will help you structure your thoughts, construct a statement or text logically and consistently. Especially if you are arguing with someone or want to convincingly present your point of view on some problem.
First, you put forward a Theory and Practice of Argumentation thesis or assumption. Then you expand it a little, explain what exactly you mean. And finally, present evidence. For example:
Thesis: “Reading the classics is important and necessary.” Argument: “Classical literature helps increase vocabulary, develops imagination and emotional intelligence.” Proof: “Scientists have found in Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind that people who read classic literature are better at recognizing other people’s emotions.”
Listen passively
In fact, this is an imitation of participation in a conversation. Sometimes such a passive role manifests itself in complete relaxation, predominant silence, or formal and not always appropriate “uh-huh.” In the interlocutor, this style of listening causes sadness, suspicion of indifference, resentment, and reluctance to communicate in the future. Passive listening can be situational and conditioned by certain circumstances. So here are some tips.
It is better to interrupt the conversation altogether than to listen passively. Frankly say that you do not understand enough about the topic of communication, you are not interested in the question raised, you are tired or in a hurry.
If it is impossible to avoid communication for certain reasons, do not “drop out of the conversation”, do not look at your interlocutor, thinking about your own, do not yawn - it is better to find a reason for a break and warm up when no one sees you.
Try to concentrate and find something interesting for yourself in the dialogue. To learn to listen, you need to eliminate passive listening.
Write loglines for films and books
A logline is a very short retelling of the plot in a few lines. Screenwriters use it to quickly explain what their story is about.
For example, the logline for the movie “Forrest Gump” sounded like this: “Forrest Gump, although not very smart, becomes an accidental participant in historical events, and his true love Jenny Curran eludes him.”
And here is the logline of The Matrix: “A hacker learns from mysterious rebels about the true nature of the familiar world and about his role in the war against those who control this world.”
It may seem that writing a logline (or its more extended versions - annotation and synopsis) is a piece of cake. But even for writers this is sometimes difficult. After all, you have to learn to highlight the most important thing in the plot, and even explain the essence in just a dozen words. So creating loglines can be great training if you want to learn how to express your thoughts clearly and understandably.
Exercises for the development of competent speech and correct expression of thoughts
There is another side to the coin: the person is smart, competent, but does not know how to work with an audience. In public he gets lost and looks unconvincing. Nobody listens to him. This way you won’t get to practice; everything will remain at the level of theory. Competent speech requires a certain skill, but how can you learn to speak as beautifully and competently as possible using exercises? Not everyone knows about this. Let's try to figure it out.
Learning and quoting terms
It is impossible to understand the world without explaining it. Memorizing terms from the fields of sociology, philosophy, political science and law works great. Only at first glance, such an activity looks strange. In fact, this is excellent mental training because smart thoughts make a person more developed.
Pronouncing tongue twisters
You can get rid of pronunciation deficiencies only through good diction. Do not neglect such a proven method as pronouncing tongue twisters. They need to be taught and be sure to be spoken out loud. The faster you pronounce, the better your skills.
Practicing non-verbal language
There are a number of nonverbal signals that convey to the public confidence in the speaker’s abilities. They can be easily found on the Internet: gestures of righteousness, superiority, persuasion. It is important for a nonverbal person not only to know, but also to be able to use it. When practicing your speech, you should supplement it with exercises, thanks to which your speeches will become more convincing.
Argumentation
In a dispute, there is often a lack of arguments, and then the transition to personality begins, shouting and swearing. This exercise will help you identify the pros and cons of each phenomenon. For example, the recent pandemic. Cons: high mortality rate, lack of travel, broken economy. Pros: the environment has improved, people began to pay more attention to health, to disinfect their hands.
Learning funny stories
How to reach the audience? Tell an interesting story that will help gain attention. It may be a historical fact, a made-up story, or an embellished event. Owning several dozen tales will lead to the fact that you will use them at the right time. If you have talent, over time you will begin to compose stories yourself that you can share with the listener.
We recommend: Books and exercises that will improve your communication skills with people
Pay attention to emotions
What you need to know about emotions is that they are mainly focused on a person's face. This is the most important place to consider emotions. Of course, they can be found in other places, but more than 80% of emotions are concentrated on the face. And here it is necessary to bring a voice. Intonation also says a lot. So, of course, you need to start with recognizing facial expressions.
Psychology of human behavior
Microexpressions
Everyone knows what joy looks like, but it’s harder to recognize microexpressions on the face. For example, if someone experiences some emotion but tries to hide it. Let's say you're interviewing for a job and you've been given an offer that exceeds all your expectations, but you don't want to show it, you don't want your employer to know it.
They tell you: “We are ready to offer you a salary of so and so rubles, okay, an interesting offer.” And we see that a person literally loses control over his emotions for an instant. In this case, a smile slipped through. And we understand what emotions a person experiences. But microexpressions are not a core skill for reading people.
Description of the technique
When swimming with this style, all the swimmer’s muscles are involved:
- performs wave-like movements with the body;
- wave-like kicks with legs;
- strong strokes with your hands.
Externally, the movements are similar to the movement of a dolphin, which is why butterfly is sometimes called the dolphin technique.
You can clearly see a swimmer using this swimming technique in the video below. In slow motion, all the nuances of movements are especially clearly visible.
Is explanation an art, or is technology possible?
Kemaev Oleg
Jun 11 · 5 min read
Surely, in your life you have encountered a situation when you tried to explain something to another person and, despite your sincere efforts, it did not work out. And of course, we met people who were great at explaining things; it seemed they could talk about anything clearly and understandably. I also met such people, they aroused my admiration and I wanted to exclaim - “Well, how does he do it! This is an incomprehensible art.” And I was always worried about the question: Is it possible to learn this?
I think any master of his craft will say that you can learn anything, but you need a lot of training and practice. But, unfortunately, not every master can tell you how to train. I was able to approach the art of explanation through the practice of the Smyslotek company. We often have to make explanatory videos (1500 videos in 5 years) and help explain complex things.
Practice and training of other people allowed us to develop a unique approach - an explanation constructor. Using the constructor, you can start practicing “assembling” explanations, improving your skills and mastering the art of explanation. In a series of notes, I will try to talk about the “constructor” and give its main parts so that you can “assemble” and practice. In this note, we will clarify the concept of an explanation and the components of a constructor.
The components of the construction set allow you to make different assemblies and practice explaining
I was once asked, “Can you tell me which explanation is the best and most effective?” And I immediately wanted to answer - “Of course, an explanation that is understandable to a large number of people.” But I remembered our Meaningful Practice and realized that such an answer would not be correct. After all, sometimes the task is to explain something to one person, for example to the top manager of a company. And if this was done, then the task was completed and the explanation was good. It turns out that everything depends on the problem, the solution of which requires an explanation. Therefore, when planning to explain, it is worth answering the question - Why is an explanation needed?
Ending a conversation
Make sure the person actually speaks out. At the end of the conversation, do not give your own assessment of the situation, do not summarize the story. Don't expect to be able to say anything about yourself now. Just end the conversation with a few polite phrases - “It was nice talking.” "Let's meet again someday." “You were so interesting to listen to.” Offer the person help if you have such an opportunity, but do not give unnecessary hopes. Weigh your physical, energy and material resources. Remember that you have already helped the person by listening carefully.
Listening is a complex concept that also includes the ability to respond. Learning to listen is a big step towards becoming a skilled communicator.
How to learn to listen and respond?
Let's look at a few tips to help you learn to listen and fully participate in a conversation. After all, the ability to listen and speak is also the ability to respond correctly.
1. Prepare yourself psychologically for the conversation. Don’t try to hide something, it’s better to try to change your internal attitudes: even if you remain silent, the interlocutor will still understand how you really feel about the topic of conversation, the problem raised, or actually towards him personally. Negative or not too serious internal settings will still emerge from any polite words. Therefore, treat your interlocutor with respect, be patient, focus your attention, and being able to listen means being able to tune in to the conversation.
2. Remember that we do not have the right to condemn a person, treat him with disdain, or act as a “smart guy,” “advisor,” or “savior.” Remember - you are only a good listener, nothing more.
3. Don't worry about impressing your interlocutor: while you're looking for brilliant answers, compelling arguments, and killer facts, you risk missing out on important information. A much better chance of being liked is to listen carefully.
4. Make it clear that you will keep the story secret, but do not insist if the person is not ready to be completely honest with you. Encourage sincerity, but do not interrogate or “get to the bottom.”
Listen hard
With such listening, a person demonstrates loyalty to the interlocutor in every way - even to the point of crude primitive flattery: he catches every word, shows his agreement with all theses (even if in a few minutes he hears something radically opposite). Tone, posture, words for maintaining a conversation - everything is aimed only at asserting its secondary role. This is how a subordinate can listen to his boss, a woman can listen to her tyrant husband, a sycophantic student can listen to his teacher. For a reasonable and adequate person, this way of listening causes disappointment, disrespect and even disgust.
There is only one piece of advice - you shouldn’t show your devotion in this way. Even if life has brought you together with a person to whom it is impossible to prove your point of view, maintain a sense of dignity. It's better to just remain silent. Consider whether your behavior is achieving the result you hope for. Or maybe it’s even worth changing your job or life partner? But there is no doubt that you need to change yourself.
Important qualities for correct formulation of thoughts
People may not express their thoughts entirely correctly for a variety of reasons. This is usually due to the fact that the speaker has a limited vocabulary, which is not enough to pronounce the phrase correctly. A person may select synonyms that are not entirely clear in meaning or use words that do not suit the style of the narrative. Speech variety is a determining factor in learning how to correctly express your thoughts in conversation.
In its absence, choosing the right word may take the speaker some time. To avoid awkward long silences, you need to train your speech function. To do this, it is important to use the following techniques (they are often given in response to the question “how to learn to express your thoughts”):
- The quality of memorizing information should be trained. To clearly express your ideas, improve attention and memory, learn poetry effectively, memorize the longest sequences of numbers, learn the lyrics of your favorite songs.
- It is necessary to increase the volume of a person’s linguistic reserve. Reading fiction can help with this. When a person reads books, he learns to formulate thoughts correctly, which can then be spoken (this will help anyone who does not know how to learn to clearly speak phrases that can immediately arouse the interest of the interlocutor).
- Increasing concentration of attention on a specific thought. It is important to be able to concentrate on what needs to be said - this will help to reproduce the thought out loud without inaccuracies, accidentally spoken words, or erroneous expressions.
It is especially important for the speaker not to lose attention or weaken it, since otherwise he may make mistakes in his speech. To understand how to correctly express your thoughts, you need to eliminate the causes of the difficulties that have arisen.
Explanation - Embrace Clarity
Explanation is needed to enhance understanding and show clarity. And understanding can be represented as a certain process during which something becomes clear. I like the following definition of explanation.
An explanation is a description of facts that makes them understandable. So that their causes, context and consequences become clear.
The manifestation of clarity is possible from different sides and for different people the clarity will be different. Therefore, explanation is nothing more than an embrace of clarity. This is both the beauty and the difficulty of explanation.
In an explanation, clarity must always be focused on the audience, from the audience's point of view. for each audience you can show your clarity
The beauty is that there can be as many explanations as you like, i.e. You can always come up with your own explanation. The challenge is that you need to be able to be clear from the point of view of your target audience. Take the place of the audience and look through the eyes of the target audience from the “picture of the world” of the audience.
Listen aggressively
With aggressive listening, a person strives to dominate communication in all ways - words, general behavior, posture, tone. This style does not mean that such an interlocutor knows how to listen. It is precisely such listeners who sometimes fail to hear and understand their interlocutor so much that they can then be taken aback: “You didn’t say that.”
The interlocutor’s reaction to such a hearing is psychological defense, irritation, a transition to similar behavior and, accordingly, an unwillingness to listen to arguments, a desire to prove that he is right at any cost, or, on the contrary, avoidance, withdrawal into oneself, refusal to communicate. This kind of behavior is precisely a failure to listen. Therefore, tips that will help you be able to listen:
- Don’t try to seize the initiative in a conversation, don’t interrupt, don’t change the subject, don’t turn the conversation on yourself.
- Let your interlocutor speak out, don’t predict his thoughts, don’t finish his sentences for him, don’t rush into objections.
- Stay calm, don’t give in to your emotions, don’t raise your tone, don’t stoop to changing your vocabulary to something more harsh.
- Watch your posture and facial expressions: do not be tense, do not clench your teeth or fists, do not cross your arms over your chest, do not frown, do not show disdain, distrust, skepticism, or a mocking attitude.
- Don’t make unnecessary movements: don’t fidget in your chair, don’t tap your fingers, don’t “play” with some objects.
- If you can't pull yourself together, find an opportunity to pause to calm down.
