I spent an hour today listening to a friend of mine tell me how much she hates her boss and how unhappy she is at her job. She’s been there for over a year, and the situation has gotten progressively worse, and she’s now going to go to the director and then to HR to lodge a formal complaint. Her issues with her boss are many, but the main ones are lack of respect, pettiness, micromanaging, and favoritism. My friend says that over the past few weeks, she’s stopped offering ideas at the weekly meetings, has stopped doing her best at a job she used to love, and she suffers from daily headaches, which now make her miss work.
When she started sharing her story with me this afternoon, she caught me off-guard. I was wrapped up in my own head, thinking of projects I had to finish at work, thinking of things I had to pack for our big trip to Australia and New Zealand next week. And so, while I heard her talking and made the requisite non-verbal signs that I was listening, I really wasn’t. I was on auto-pilot, which probably explains why her venting went on so long. I just wasn’t being a good listener. I wasn’t Active Listening.
When I am fully present in a conversation and I actively listen to someone, I am connected and the person I’m conversing with feels as though I’m “getting them” and fully understanding whatever it is they’re talking about. My empathy allows them to dig deeper and maybe get to places in their thinking or feelings that they wouldn’t get to if they just thought someone was faking concern, or not getting the issue because they were interrupting or offering advice that was way off the mark. Active listening facilitates trust…and because of that trust, wonderful things can happen. Like discovery, new solutions, liberation…you name it.
The nice thing about the Gordon Model is that if you realize you’ve missed the boat, you can always go back. So tomorrow, I’m going to find my friend, and this time, I’m going to tell her that even though she caught me at a bad time today, I’ve had a chance to think about her and how she’s feeling…and I’ll pull a little Active Listening out of my back pocket and see where we end up. My guess is that she’ll finally get the feeling that she’s being heard…and once that need is met, who knows, maybe she’ll come up with some brand new ways to approach her boss and solve the problem!