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Become a Better Listener

An interview with Mark Goulston by Sarah Green Carmichael

Mark Goulston is a psychiatrist and the author of many books, including Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone. In this interview, he discusses how you can improve your listening skills by helping your counterpart “feel felt” and encouraging them to open up to you at deeper and deeper levels.

Sarah Green Carmichael: When you talk about listening and helping people become better listeners, are you working from one definition? Or do you have many definitions?

Mark Goulston: There are four levels of talking: talking over, at, to, or with. They parallel the four kinds of listening, and there’s a one-to-one correlation.

What goes along with talking over someone is what I call removed listening. Removed listening is when you’re really not there. Now, if you’re someone who can multitask, you can be kind of foolish, and while someone’s trying to get your attention—perhaps a spouse or something like that—you can put down your iPad and you’ll parrot back exactly what they said, because you’re a great multitasker. And if you then smile, taking delight in how you were able to spout that back to them, you’re going to spend the night in the den. So removed listening is insulting, and it goes along with when someone’s talking over you.

Now, when someone’s talking at you, that is the second level, which is reactive listening. That’s when no matter what the other person says, you get defensive. You take an issue with it. You’re taking it personally. Doing that is actually fairly upsetting to the conversation.

When someone’s talking to you, that goes along with responsible listening. You’re being responsible to the conversation.

But the gold standard—and for me it’s the gold standard because I think we need to connect better in the world—is what I call receptive listening, which goes along with talking with someone. The difference between responsible listening and receptive listening is that if you can imagine a young child is freezing and they knock on the door and come in, responsible listening is to say, “Oh, you were out in the rain. You must have been out there for a long time. You’re drenched.” That’s responsible listening, while that little child is shivering.

In receptive listening, you don’t even need the words. You can say, “My god. You look chilled to the bone. Let’s get you into some dry clothes. Let’s get you near the heater, and let’s get you out of those things.”

So can you feel the difference between responsible and receptive listening? One of the things that I talk about in Just Listen is the difference between feeling figured out, feeling understood, and feeling felt. And again—you’re already catching my bias—I go to the feeling felt issue.

There’s an anecdote that I often speak about from Just Listen, where I was meeting with a CEO. I was trying to get an appointment. It wasn’t easy. He was a big footballer type of guy, must’ve been 270 pounds, with trophies behind him. As I’m seated with him, I can see that the last thing he wants to do is have a conversation with me.

Now, I can be a little bit bold. So I’m seated there, and I’m not keeping his attention. So imagine this (and this is what you can do when you don’t work for a company, because your company would fire you): I said to him, “How much time do you have for me?” And he looked at me. He said, “What?” I said, “Yeah. Look on your schedule. How much time do you have for me?” I knew he was going to throw me out then.

He said, “20 minutes.” I knew I had about 30 seconds to turn this around.

But I got his attention. I said, “Look, we’re into minute three, and what I wanted to talk to you about is worth your undivided attention, I believe. You can’t give me your undivided attention because you’ve got a lot of things on your mind and there are several things that I think you need to take care of.

“So here’s the deal. Let’s stop now. You take the next 16 minutes, take care of whatever’s on your mind, and we’ll reschedule this. Or you can just tell your assistant that I was just too rude and bold, and you never have to see me again. But take the next 16 minutes, which maybe you don’t have the rest of the day, and take care of whatever’s on your mind. We’ll redo this another time. It’s less important.”

At that point, he looked at me and he teared up. And I said to myself, Mark, you promised yourself you wouldn’t make these people cry in the business world. I mean, you’re a psychiatrist. Can’t you just leave that behind?

Yeah, that escalated very quickly.

It did. It did. And he looked at me and said, “You know, you’ve known me for three minutes. There are people 20 yards from where we are that don’t know what you know, because I’m very private. My wife’s having a biopsy and it doesn’t look good.

“My wife’s stronger than me. And she told me, ‘You go to work.’ So I’m here at work, but I’m really not here.”

Then I immediately switched from brazen to compassion. I said, “Wow. I’m sorry to hear that. Go be with her. You’re not here. Go be with her or make a call. Go do that.”

And it was interesting. He was like a big Newfoundland dog coming in from the rain. He shook his shoulders and went, “pfff.” He centered himself and said, “You know, I’m not as strong as my wife, but I’m pretty strong. I served a couple tours in Vietnam. You’ve got my undivided attention, and you’ve got your full 20 minutes.”

What’s the point of this story? He felt felt. There he was, feeling alone in this and didn’t want to burden his wife. And he was this big CEO. It shouldn’t surprise you that not only did I get his undivided attention, we’ve been friends ever since.

Well, and that raises a really interesting point, which is that we can all be doing everything we can to listen at all these different levels that you’ve mentioned, but it doesn’t really count unless the other person feels like we’ve heard them. So walk me through how we can do a better job at making other people feel heard or feel felt.

In my training of people to be better listeners—and I work with major consulting companies about how to turn a conversation into getting hired—when I’ve finished the presentation, what I’ve said is, your main goal when you first meet a prospect, a potential client, is to get a second meeting that they initiate. It’s not to sell them anything in the first meeting.

As you’re asking them questions, there will be a point at which they say, “What do you think?” What I suggest—and this is not for all cases, you have to pick and choose—but I suggest that you never answer the first question they ask you after you’ve had some conversation. Instead, what you focus on are four things: hyperbole, inflection, adverbs, and adjectives.

Hyperbole is when people use words like “outlandish,” “horrendous,” or “wonderful.” Inflection is when they raise their voice. Notice adverbs and adjectives, because an adverb is a way of embellishing a verb: “We need to do this quickly.” And an adjective is a way of embellishing a noun: “This is an amazing opportunity.” You need to notice. Be a first-class noticer.

When you notice hyperbole, inflection, adverbs, and adjectives, you’re being given an invitation to a deeper conversation. You have the chance to take the conversation to a level that your competitors don’t.

So when they’ve said something and they ask you, “What do you think?” you say, “I can tell you what I think, but say more about having to do this thing quickly,” or “Say more about the amazing opportunity.” What you’ll notice, if you’re face-to-face with them, is that they will start to use hand gestures, and their hands will go up from their hips to midabdomen.

Then, there’s something else I talk about in Just Listen called conversation deepeners. “Say more about such and such” is one of them. But then after they finish whatever they’re saying, another conversation deepener is to say, “Really?” Then what you’ll see is they’re going to raise their hands even more. “Oh, yeah. This is really amazing. If we could do this, this would change everything.”

In your mind’s eye what you’re trying to do is to get them to open up at deeper and deeper levels, because then they’ll be invested in the conversation more than just at a transactional level. You’re helping them get everything off their chest, from the positive to the negative. And even then, if they ask “So what do you think”—because now they’re really intrigued—I say, “I can tell you what I think, but I’d like to take our conversation to the ICU.”

Now, I can get away with saying that because I’m a medical doctor, but they’re going to say, “What?” Tell them, “ICU stands for important, critical, and urgent. Important is a year, two years from now. Critical is three to six months. And urgent is this week. I can guess at which of the things we talked about are important, critical, and urgent. But rather than my guessing, why don’t you tell me?”

What you’re trying to do is get them to just dump everything into the conversation at deeper levels. They may be a little bit off balance, because you’ve just invited them to dump it all out, but now you’re giving them the opportunity to focus it and prioritize it. And what you really want to focus them on is what’s urgent.

Can you get a sense of just how this is uncovering all kinds of things in the conversation? If I’m dealing with training a consultant, at that point they’re going to say, “Well, what do you think? I’ve told you what’s important, critical, and urgent.”

Even then what I say is, “You know, I can give you an answer right now. But it would be a B, B+ answer. You’ve just shared with me things that are important, critical, and urgent, and it would be my best answer, based on what I know now. I’d like to take a day or two days to check on something so I could give you an even better answer. What it comes down to is, how urgent is this that you’ve talked to me about, and how interested would you be in my getting my best answer for it. What do you think?”

What you want them to do is say, “It’s urgent, and I’d like that best answer soon.” And then you let them initiate it, as opposed to the unfortunate thing that many of us do, where, out of our own nervousness, we need to prove how smart we are. Sometimes in a conversation, we’re there impressing them with all this brightness, and then at the end they pause, and they start to disengage. On the heels of us impressing them with all our brightness, we’re scurrying, saying, “So what do we do next? Do you have any other questions?” By then, the cow has left the barn.

So can you picture this? It’s almost like a surgical approach to a conversation.

It’s interesting because I feel like we started out talking about listening. And I had this assumption that it was all about reining in your own feelings and any distractions so you could be fully present. But actually it seems like a lot of what we’ve ended up talking about is getting other people to talk, like getting other people to share the information with you that maybe is in their head but that they just weren’t disclosing before.

Absolutely true. The key is helping them talk about what’s most important, critical, and urgent to them. I think we’re in a world in which people want to buy, but nobody wants to be sold. People don’t want to be persuaded. And people don’t even like to do the persuading.

MARK GOULSTON, MD, FAPA, is a business psychiatrist, executive advisor, keynote speaker, and the CEO and founder of the Goulston Group. He is the author of Talking to “Crazy”: How to Deal with the Irrational and Impossible People in Your Life and Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone, and a coauthor of Real Influence: Persuade Without Pushing and Gain Without Giving In. He can be reached at markgoulston.com. Follow him on Twitter @markgoulston. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL was an executive editor at Harvard Business Review. Follow her on Twitter at @skgreen.

Adapted from “Become a Better Listener” on
HBR IdeaCast (podcast), August 13, 2015.