This week, I went to New York for work, arriving on Sunday afternoon.
I spent the afternoon sipping beer and reading on the hotel patio. Unsurprisingly, I got got hungry around dinner time and decided to try the restaurant at my hotel.
During the course of my meal, I struck up a nice conversation with a fellow diner and the restaurant manager. We talked about a bunch of things, like business travel, food, life, etc., and enjoyed each other’s company for an hour or so.
Three days later, I went to the restaurant again and enjoyed a meal of clam and bacon carbonara, washing it down with a nice, cold beer.
Once again, I found myself in conversation with the restaurant manager. This time, however, the conversation took a strange turn when he told me about his love of Cialis, a drug used for erectile dysfunction.
My brain came to a screeching halt.
“Cialis?!” I asked myself. “How did we get on this topic?”
Rather than looking shocked and appalled by the conversation, I continued to give the man my undivided attention.
“What makes it so great?” I asked, showing my endless curiosity and approach to socially awkward conversations. When he saw that I was genuinely curious, his comfort level increased and he continued.
He explained how, when trying Viagra, “everything worked” as advertised, but his heart started pounding in his chest, and he started sweating uncontrollably. He felt like he was going to die.
After that, he stopped taking Viagra and tried Cialis. Since then, he has been in love with his little yellow pills and has never been happier, at least in some areas.
Why did I share that story with you? Because the story contains a valuable lesson.
You see, the Cialis-loving restaurant manager was not the first person to open up to me about something so personal. It happens to me all the time. People seek me out when they need to talk to someone a personal matter but don’t want to feel judged for it. For some reason, people find me worthy of hearing deeply personal things about themselves.
Why do they tell me of all people? From what I can tell, the answer is simple: I listen better than most people.
When I listen, my goal is to go beyond “I heard you” and get to “I understand you.” Ultimately, people want to be understood, and the best way to understand people is to listen deeply when they speak.
Deep listening is, in my opinion, the ultimate sign of respect and the key to getting through to anybody. When you truly listen to another person and give them your undivided attention, they cannot help but tell you everything about themselves.
Benjamin Disraeli said, “Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.” The converse applies to listening. Listen to a man talk about himself and he will talk for hours.
The Cialis-loving restaurant manager was no exception. He wanted to talk but needed someone to listen. Since I was busy stuffing my face with clam and bacon carbonara, I concluded that I was the listener in this conversation. Every few minutes, I would pause between bites, ask another question, and listen to another answer.
Because the manager learned on the first night that I actually listened to him and gave a damn about what he said, he just kept talking.
All of that brings me to my point: deep listening is the key to connecting with people.
If you want to build meaningful relationships of any kind, you must listen and listen deeply. In conversation, we focus so much on saying what they have to say that we forget to listen to what other people have to say.
We listen only so that we know when we can talk again. We fail to pause for, reflect on, and respond to the other person’s statements, skipping the first two steps because we absolutely must be heard right now.
Trust me when I say that you will get plenty of time to speak if you first spend plenty of time listening. If you practice and improve your ability to listen deeply to others, you will see your relationships flourish, personally and professionally.
So how do you listen deeply? It’s simple really.
Lose your ego. Stop thinking about yourself for once and start thinking about other people. Become, as Dale Carnegie wrote in How to Win Friends and Influence People, genuinely interested in other people.
The most boring person in the world is interesting in some way. Your task is to discover what makes them interesting and get them to talk about it. Make a game out of discovering the weird quirks of others. When you do, you will find that you can connect and build relationships with anyone.
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