2. Listening in Mentoring -How to Make the Relationship Work

This is the second session in a five part series on mentoring and how to make the relationship work well. This track can be listened to on its own or as part of the series and will be particularly helpful entrepreneurs and their mentors/mentees. It concerns both parties to the relationship and there are tips, methods and suggestions throughout for how to make this most important relationship work well. This session focusses on listening, how to move from passive to active listening and the benefits its brings.

Transcript

Hello and welcome back to session two in the Making a Mentoring Relationship audio series.

And today we're going to be talking about listening as the linchpin of the mentoring relationship.

The mentoring relationship turns on listening and it requires an ability to not just listen but to actively listen,

To truly hear what is being communicated,

To see patterns,

To notice language and to mirror back.

In many ways active listening is more important for the mentor to master and the mentor can then acquire those skills from the relationship.

One of the strange things about active listening is that if you have experienced it yourself,

As in somebody has actively listened to you,

You're very likely to be able to develop the skill itself.

And this is because active listening is a somatic experience.

In other words we can actually physically sense when it is happening.

It creates a positive interaction,

Builds trust,

Stimulates the reward centers in the brain and it allows for the skill to be transferred.

It also allows for positive evaluation of recollected events.

Now that's a bit of a mouthful but what it really means is that if something troubling or difficult has occurred in my life,

If I'm being actively listened to when I recount that story,

It allows me to see and feel the positive in the events and draw wisdom from them in a way that would have been difficult if the listener was just listening in the way that we normally do in conversation and perhaps waiting for an opportunity to speak and impose their interpretation on the events.

So what do we really mean by active listening?

Active listening is different from a normal conversation in that all of your attention and focus is on the person with whom you are speaking,

Not on yourself.

Now when we hear a sentence like this we're all,

All of us inclined to think yeah I'm a really great listener and I always focus on the other party.

But what is really more likely is that we all of us behave like normal human beings in normal conversations where we tend to be partly engaged with the person we're speaking to and partly engaged with ourselves,

With our thoughts,

The thoughts that are generated from the conversation.

And then sometimes we might get a little lost in those trains of thoughts and so we're only really kind of half listening to the other person.

The usual patterns of thinking that we are engaged in,

Especially during conversation,

Are fairly mechanical and they can occur without direction or intention.

But once we begin to observe our thoughts and our thinking patterns we begin to perceive certain structures that are enormously helpful to understand.

Because when we understand the mechanical nature of most thinking we can stop doing it,

Freeing up enormous amounts of mental,

Emotional and physical energy that can be focused on other things.

And in the context of the mentoring relationship the focus would be on what the mentee is actually saying and what it means.

So this sort of mechanical thinking that goes on in most conversations is usually indicated by the prefix I appearing at the beginning of a thought.

However we don't tend to observe them as beginning with I because we're usually so identified with our thoughts that the I vanishes.

I am hungry,

I need to get that presentation finished,

I am bored,

I am lonely,

I had a similar experience,

I wouldn't react like that.

It just becomes a continuous train of internal dialogue and emotion that's created from thoughts.

And this is an important point to note,

Emotion follows thought.

Our thoughts are generators of emotion and atmosphere and that atmosphere is then picked up on by the other party to a conversation.

They can somatically feel where our focus and emotions are.

And when we perceive that someone is not fully listening to us we tend to be much less inclined to be vulnerable,

To be open and to be fearless in our expression.

And it is therefore much harder for trust to be established.

So for the purposes of distinction I'm going to call our normal mechanical thoughts eyes.

When we start to observe our thinking and these mechanical eyes we can also begin to see that they have distinct qualities to them,

That they are grouped by both time and tone.

And the first thing that you may notice is that the vast majority of your eyes are not in present time unless they relate to physical need such as I'm hungry or I am tired.

Almost all others will be related either to the past or to the future.

And the second thing that you may begin to observe is that eyes have a particular tone or flavour to them.

There are five distinct tonal groups and I'm going to give them as examples as how they might typically appear as thoughts or indeed sometimes as statements during a mentoring conversation.

The first group are judgment eyes.

An example of a judgment eye would be I never struggled with lack of confidence maybe you aren't cut out for entrepreneurship.

The second group are self-pity eyes and that might be something like we didn't have accelerators when I was building my own companies you've no idea how fortunate you are.

The third group are known as associative eyes and that might be something like yeah I know what you mean about anxiety I often feel really anxious too.

The fourth group are opposite eyes and that might be something like I really don't know why you're planning to expand in Europe I definitely prefer the US market for your product.

And then finally there's the category which is known as realization or a real eye and this is something that is true is useful is instructive and has a distinctly clear quality to it and we tend to arrive at real eyes or realizations most readily when we are engaged in active listening.

In the mentoring relationship if we are not making the effort to focus our thoughts and attention on the mentee what they are saying how they feel and if we lose ourselves in the train of our own eyes that lack of focus and often the tone of our eyes can be felt by the mentee.

We are therefore unintentionally undermining the relationship and the possibility for growth and progress in the mentee.

As we have already said the mentoring relationship asks an awful lot of both parties and it is really here in the energy required in active listening that a lot of that demand lies for the mentor.

I'm sure that you have all had the experience of getting lost in a train of thoughts or eyes during a conversation and then finding that you've been asked a question and you have no idea what the question relates to or how the conversation got there.

This can happen a lot in regular conversations or particularly if we're tired or hungry but ideally this is not something that we want to happen in the mentoring relationship.

Active listening is quite a big subject as you can imagine but we can distill some key points and tips that will help both parties to develop good practice.

Many of these tips are framed from the point of view of the mentor but they apply equally to the mentee.

Number one,

Focus on what the mentee is saying.

Now this seems obvious but as we have discussed it's easy to get carried away with our own eyes and it's easy to feel the pressure of filling in any gaps in conversation.

Often we don't fully give our focus because we're worried about what we are going to say next or worried that we must have the correct response.

It's important to remember that this is not a problem-solving conversation.

There's no obligation on the mentor to produce a silver bullet.

The most helpful aspect is in the listening itself not necessarily in the response.

When we let go of any anxiety of what to say next we find often that the appropriate response will come at the appropriate time.

So for both mentor and mentee developing good breathing habits can help enormously in active listening.

If we focus on the other person and engage with slow steady breathing it keeps us calm,

Centered and out of mechanical thinking.

Number two,

Avoid voicing judgment.

You may not agree with what the mentee is saying but it is better to deal with any incongruities with open-ended questions rather than critiques.

Criticism undermines trust and closes down vulnerability making it hard for the mentee to voice fears or insecurity and this is counterproductive in the relationship.

And this is especially so at the beginning of the relationship.

Over time as trust is established more robust exchanges are likely to be possible but they're really only possible in a deeply trusting relationship.

Now in terms of open-ended questions these are questions that need a more thoughtful reflective answer than a simple yes or no.

So questions that start with how or could or what are open-ended.

How did that make you feel?

Could you have dealt with that differently?

What is your intention with the company?

These sorts of questions can help the mentee to work through their own issues without the requirement for critique,

Advice or judgment from the mentor.

Number three,

Clarify.

If you find that the mentee is jumping from one thing to the next or it's difficult to follow their train of thought then clarification is important and this can be as simple as can you tell me that again so that I'm clear or it could be that you summarize frequently to mirror back what you have heard by saying let me just make sure that I've understood what you're telling me.

Or it could simply be reflecting back the mentee's key emotions.

Something like this seems to have made you angry or you look upset by this do you want to tell me more about it.

Sometimes gently pointing to a discrepancy in what they're saying can be illuminating.

You've told me that this did not bother you but you seem really tense when you're telling me about it.

And finally sometimes a closed question can help to clarify.

Something like you're having some issues with your co-founding team is that right?

Number four,

Guide don't solve.

If the mentee is trying to make a decision or work through options it's important that you don't as their mentor jump in to solve.

Rather that you use the techniques of open questions,

Closed questions and summarizing for the mentee to explore the options themselves.

The great gift of the mentoring relationship is that it enables the mentee to tap into their own insight and wisdom and active listening in combination with guiding questioning is a powerful way to achieve this.

Number five,

Observing physical cues.

Physical cues are important for creating the space for active listening.

Eye contact,

Open posture and facing each other is preferable.

If the meeting is over zoom the same rules apply.

Tone of voice is also important.

When we speak at a normal tone and speed the other person feels more relaxed,

More likely to be open.

Speaking quickly and at a higher pitch may be simply anxiety but it signals lack of interest,

Impatience or the desire just to get the session over with really quickly.

So slow steady breathing and being mindful to speak at a normal pitch and speed is really important in terms of active listening.

The five tips that we have just covered apply equally to the mentee.

Actively listening to what the mentor has to say to you is in fact the whole reason that you have sought a mentor in the first place.

So in summary active listening can be developed and learnt and look we all have off days.

So presencing the fact that listening is a really important part of the relationship is a good idea and often this can be done directly by simply saying to the mentee I'm here to listen at the beginning of the conversation and this serves as a parameter and a reminder.

In the next session we're going to be considering how advice can be given and received in the context of the mentoring relationship.