That headline probably didn’t appeal to you that much did it?

Power speaker – yes!

Power listener? Eh, someone else can do that.

Bernie Ferrari (author of Power Listening) lists 6 archetypes of bad listening.

1. The Opinionater: Three sentences into your address he says, “Look, let me tell how I see it…”
2. The Grouch: He may not have the right answer but he knows yours is definitely wrong.
3. The Preambler: More or less gets the answer he wants by the way he introduces his questions.
4. The Preseverator: (I didn’t understand this one)
5. The Answer Man: Eager to please, has the answer before anyone even knows what the question is.
6. The Pretender: Think I know a few pastors like this!

Ferrari (wouldn’t you love a name like that?) gives helpful and entertaining exegesis here. As he says, we probably all fall into all of these archetypes at times given the right (wrong?) circumstances.

Any more you can think of?

But let’s end on a positive note with three presidential examples from Paul Johnson, to inspire us:

George Washington listened all his life because he loved to learn and because he had no overwhelming desire to speak, unlike most of those in public life. One passion a leader should forgo, if possible, is a love affair with his own voice…Washington, happily, liked the sound of his own silence…When I was writing my book George Washington, I failed to come across any occasion when he had deliberately concealed the truth from anyone who had a right to know it.

Calvin Coolidge…was aptly called “Silent Cal.” He listened courteously to all his visitors but would not be drawn out. He said: “Nine-tenths of a President’s callers at the White House want something they ought not to have. If you keep dead still they will run down in three or four minutes.” So Coolidge would remain mute. Slight twitches of his facial muscles spoke for him. He was described as “an eloquent listener.” When he did speak, however, it was the truth.

Considering all he had to do and say, Abraham Lincoln spoke amazingly little. As he put it, “I am very little inclined on any occasion to say anything unless I hope to produce some good by it.” His Gettysburg Address is a classic instance — there is none better in history — of using as few words as possible (261, to be precise) while conveying a powerful message.

Listening is a vitally important skill and as powerful a means of communication and influence as to talk well. We spend 45% of our time doing it. Yet 75% of the time we are meant to be listening, we are distracted or preoccupied, and we only comprehend about 25% of what we hear.

The historian, Paul Johnson, recently wrote in Forbes Magazine: “Any leader aspiring to greatness must do two things, and he must do them not just at supreme moments or occasionally but all the time. Of course, there are many other things a leader must do, but these are the two that matter most: to listen and to tell the truth.” Here are seven ways to improve your listening (and leading).

1. Careful listening
When was the last time you had a phone conversation without checking your email, or filing, or driving, etc., at the same time?  When was the last time you had a face-to-face conversation that you stayed with mentally and emotionally from start to finish?

Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project stormed it’s way to the top of the New York Times Bestsellers List, but Linda Stone’s Attention Project might actually be the best way to start any Happiness Project. Stone argues that most of us operate with “continual partial attention,” She distinguishes CPA from the simple and useful multi-tasking of the past, and warns that it leads to over-stimulation, a cascade of stress hormones, and a lack of fulfillment. The remedy, she says, is to re-train ourselves to pay attention.

Make sure you are paying continuous careful attention to what the person is saying. Listen for change of tone, volume, pace, intensity, and for pauses. Unless you have pre-arranged it with the listener(s), do not interrupt conversations and meetings by checking your email or taking a phone call. And don’t be looking everywhere else when talking or listening to someone.

2. Patient listening
We can think at 1000-3000 words per minute (wpm) and listen at 400-500 wpm; but the average speaker speaks at 125-175 wpm. We have to deliberately slow down our minds to listen well.  Don’t interrupt and don’t jump in immediately; that looks as if you were not listening but really just waiting to speak

3. Loving listening
What makes a man a great preacher? Not sure if “being a great listener” would be among the top answers. Yet, that’s what Burk Parsons persuasively argues in The Wisdom of Listening:

Burk says that great listening produces great preachers because “they have earned the right to be heard.” Years of listening and learning have produced wisdom that’s worth hearing. Burk’s focus here is on the head: great listeners are great learners.

I’m going to “piggy-back” on Burk’s insight and also add a focus on the heart: great listeners are great lovers. Let me quickly explain what I mean. Passionate love produces passionate listening. One of the best ways to communicate “I love you,” is to communicate, “I’m listening to you,” even when what the person is saying is so boring or so wrong.

When people feel listened to, they feel loved, and respond with loving listening. When people sense that their pastor is carefully and prayerfully listening to them in their homes on a Thursday evening, it’s so much easier to listen to him on a Sunday morning. His great listening in their homes produces great listening in the church. In fact, his great listening transforms him (in their hearts and minds) into a great preacher.

4. Gracious listening
The pastor is a trained communicator. That’s his business. He’s good at it – or should be. Most people have not had the training or practice that we have had, their speaking skills may be poor, and we may catch ourselves wanting to get away. Try to listen to the content rather than judge how they are saying it (stop counting the coughs, eh’s, ah’s, etc.) or how they appear.

There are others who are passionate about something (like their arthritis!) that completely bores you; and again you are tempted to excuse yourself. Or you see the multi-millionaire pass while you are talking to an unemployed man, and the money-man seems to be so much more interesting.

Listening gives us an opportunity to exercise grace to the poor speakers, the boring speakers, the unimportant speakers. Think about how God listens to your poor, boring and unimportant prayers!

5. Interactive listening
Listening is not just one person talking and the other person standing there doing nothing. Good listeners interact with what they hear, which in turn encourages the speaker to keep going.

• Remind that you are listening with short affirmations and nods.
• Repeat what is said from time to time:  “Did I hear you say……?”
• Rephrase what you heard to show you are not just listening but understanding: “You mean that he actually..?”
• Reflect the feeling that accompanies what is said: “You seem to be (upset, lonely, etc).”

6. Body listening
In a sense everybody is bilingual – we all have verbal language and body language. Statistics show good communicators make eye-contact 50% of the time when speaking and 90% of the time when listening.We also listen with our eyebrows, our facial expressions, our arms, our body angle (facing = warm, turned away = cold), our posture (erect = defensive, bowed shoulders = teachable), our legs (open = friendly, crossed = resistant), hands (fist = aggressive, open = friendly), angle (leaning away = disbelieving, leaning in = interested). Talk to a border guard or an immigration officer if you want an intensive course in body language.

7. Christ-like listening
Listening, when done well is a tiring activity. It is an active rather than a passive ability and a lot of it it should leave you feeling exhausted. But listening is also a rewarding activity. It is personally rewarding and people will reward you too. As we have seen people are more likely to listen to you if you listen to them. But listening should be a natural activity. Sometimes a discussion like this can make a person analyze themselves and everyone else in a scientific way. Try to absorb some of these lessons, but let them become second nature to you rather than a conscious effort. Finally, listening is a Christ-like activity. He is not only the greatest Message, and the greatest Communicator, but also the greatest Listener.

Just came across this, which updates this morning’s post and also argues for the productivity benefits of single-tasking.

“I think that perhaps 80% of my work depends on my listening to someone, or on someone listening to me.”

“I’ve been thinking back about things that have gone wrong over the past couple of years, and I suddenly realized that many of the troubles have resulted from someone not hearing something, or getting it in a distorted way.”

“It’s interesting to me that we have considered so many facets of communication [here], but have inadvertently overlooked listening.”

The comments of pastors? No, the results of a 1957 survey about the role of workplace-listening at a major manufacturing plant in the Chicago area.

If it was true in factories, how much more in churches? And if it was true then, how much more now!

Pastor Thabiti Anyabwile has begun to address this in a helpful series of blogs on how to listen to sermons. The authors of the Chicago survey also offered some tips on “efficient listening” to spoken addresses:

1. The listener thinks ahead of the talker, trying to anticipate what the oral discourse is leading to and what conclusions will be drawn from the words spoken at the moment.
2. The listener weighs the evidence used by the talker to support the points that he makes. “Is this evidence valid?” the listener asks himself. “Is it the complete evidence?”
3. Periodically the listener reviews and mentally summarizes the points of the talk completed thus far.
4. Throughout the talk, the listener “listens between the lines” in search of meaning that is not necessarily put into spoken words. He pays attention to nonverbal communication (facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice) to see if it adds meaning to the spoken words. He asks himself, “Is the talker purposely skirting some area of the subject? Why is he doing so?”

But, of course, the problem goes beyond listening to sermons. For example, when was the last time you had a phone conversation without checking your email, or filing, or driving, etc., at the same time?  When was the last time you had a face-to-face conversation that you stayed with mentally and emotionally from start to finish?

Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project stormed it’s way to the top of the New York Times Bestsellers List, but Linda Stone’s Attention Project might actually be the best way to start any Happiness Project. Stone argues that most of us operate with “continual partial attention,” She distinguishes CPA from the simple and useful multi-tasking of the past, and warns that it leads to over-stimulation, a cascade of stress hormones, and a lack of fulfillment. The remedy, she says is to re-train ourselves to pay attention:

Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with phamaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool.

How much more Christ-like we would be if we we used this extraordinary tool as He used it.

Further Resources for CPA
Speed Listening 1
Speed Listening 2
Speed Listening 3

Picture: 2006 © Yuri Arcurs. Image from BigStockPhoto.com