The Power of Social Intelligence: 10 ways to tap into your social genius. Tony Buzan
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is going to help you redress that balance.
Self-check 1
How would you rate yourself as a listener? On a scale from 0–100, with 0 representing the worst listener imaginable, and 100 meaning that you listen better than anybody else, how well do you think you listen to people?
Self-check 2
On a scale of 0–100, how do you think the following people would rate you as a listener?
1. Your family (you may give them individual ratings or a group average)
2. Your best friend
3. Your other friends
4. Your boss
5. Your work colleagues
6. Any people you supervise at work
Most people (in fact a staggering 85 per cent) rate their listening ability as average or less. On a 0–100 scale, the average rating is 55. Only a tiny 5 per cent score themselves in the 80–90 range, or consider themselves excellent listeners. By the time you have finished reading this chapter, you should be in that top category!
When it comes to other people assessing your listening skills, if you gave your best friend the highest score out of the six groups, you will be in the majority! In fact most people believe that their best friend would give them a higher rating as a listener than they would give to themselves.
People rate their boss as giving them the second-highest listener rating, and this rating also tends to be higher than the rating they give themselves. This is because of the power of authority. People tend to pay more attention to those who have their lives, or part of them, in their hands. Interestingly, and you can muse upon this, colleagues and subordinates tend to be rated exactly the same as the individual rates herself or himself – 55 out of 100.
Scores for family members range widely, depending on the particular structure of the family and the interpersonal relationships. Rather depressingly, the ratings which people thought their spouse or partner would give their listening skills tend to decline in inverse proportion to the number of years they have been together. There is a moral in there …
Bad Listening Habits
There are 10 listening habits that are most damaging to your skill as a listener and most weakening of your Social Intelligence.
1 Pretending to pay attention when you are really not
2 Trying to do other things while listening
3 Deciding the subject is uninteresting
4 Getting distracted by the speaker’s way of speech, or other mannerisms
5 Getting over-involved and thus losing the main thread of the person’s argument or thoughts
6 Letting emotion-filled words arouse personal anger and antagonism
7 Concentrating on any distractions instead of what is being said
8 Taking linear, one-colour notes
9 Listening primarily for facts
10 Avoiding anything that is complex or difficult
Of which bad listening habits are you guilty?! Make a note of where your weaknesses lie, and where you can do most to improve your listening skills.
Active Listening
Listening is not a passive activity; it’s not the ‘unexciting’ or ‘unflamboyant’ part of a conversation. As I myself found out, listening well is the vital ingredient in a successful, productive and interesting conversation.
‘Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.’
(Robert Benchley)
Nor is it just a person’s words that we should listen to. If we are aware of the other person’s body language as well (see Chapter 2) we can intuit so much more meaning from any conversation – we can listen to what they feel as well as what they say.
There is a humorous phase that is particularly apt here: ‘I know that you believe that you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant!’
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