LISTENING SKILLS
A POWERFUL KEY TO
SUCCESSFUL NEGOTIATING

continued:

Interactive Listening Skills

  The second type of listening skills are those used to interact with the speaker. These skills help ensure that you understand what the sender is communicating, and they acknowledge the sender's feelings. Interactive skills include clarifying, verifying, and reflecting.

Clarifying

  Clarifying is using facilitative questions to clarify information, get additional information, and explore all sides of an issue. Examples: "Can you clarify this?" "What specific information do you want?" "When do you want the report?"

Verifying

  Verifying is paraphrasing the speaker's words to ensure understanding and to check meaning and interpretation with him or her. Examples: "As I understand it, your plan is..." "It sounds like you're saying..." "This is what you've decided and the reasons are..."

Reflecting

  Reflecting is making empathetic remarks that acknowledge the speaker's feelings. If negotiators are to create win/win outcomes, they must be empathetic. Most people think of themselves as relatively empathetic. In fact, most of us easily feel empathy for others who are experiencing what we have experienced. But true empathy is a skill, not a memory. Negotiators who have developed the ability to empathize can display it even when encountering counterparts with whom they have little in common. The ability of a negotiator to empathize has been found to significantly affect the counterpart's behavior and attitudes.

  To be empathetic, negotiators need to accurately perceive the content of the message. Second, they need to give attention to the emotional components and the unexpressed core meanings of the message. Finally, they need to attend to the feelings of the other, but remain detached, whereas a sympathetic individual would adopt those feelings as his or her own. Empathy involves understanding and relating to another's feelings. Examples: "I can see that you were frustrated because..." "You felt that you didn't get a fair shake." "You seem very confident that you can do a great job for..."

  To truly practice reflective listening, you must make no judgments and pass along no opinions or provide any solutions. You simply acknow- ledge the sender's emotional content. Examples:

Sender: "How do you expect me to complete the project by next Monday?"

Reflective response: "It sounds like you are overwhelmed by your increased workload."

Or

Sender: "Hey Mary, what's the idea of not approving my requisition for a new filing cabinet?"

Reflective response: "You sound really upset over not getting your request approved."

  The goal of reflective listening is to acknowledge the emotion that your counterpart has conveyed and to reflect back the content using different words. Example:

Sender: "I can't believe you want me to do the job in less than a week."

Reflective response: "You sound stressed about the amount of time it will take to complete the job."

  If your reflective response is constructed properly, the natural reaction from your counterpart will be to provide more explanation and information. Here are some key points you will find helpful in learning to be empathetic.

1. Recognize and identify emotions. Most inexperienced negotiators are not adept at recognizing the myriad emotions. You will find it easier to identify others' emotions if you can easily identify your own. Are you frustrated, stressed, angry, happy, sad, nervous?
2. Rephrase the content. If you restate your counterpart's comments word for word, he or she will believe you are parroting him or her. Doing so not only sounds awkward, it will make your counterpart angry. The key is to restate the content using different words.
3. Make noncommittal responses. A good way to start reflective 
   state-ments is with such phrases as "It sounds like..." "It appears that..." "It seems like..." These phrases work well because they are noncommittal. If you blatantly state, "You are angry be- cause..." most people will proceed to tell you why you are in- correct.
4. Make educated guesses. Recently I was involved in a negotiation in which one negotiator told his counterpart that the other had sub-mitted a ridiculous offer in an attempt to buy his company. The negotiator responded, "It almost sounds like you are insulted by my offer." The counterpart replied, "Not insulted, just shocked." Although the negotiator was not entirely accurate in his assess-ment of his counterpart's emotion, it was a good educated guess.

  In conclusion, when you want to improve your listening skills, a good rule to remember is that God gave you two ears and one mouth--you should use them in their respective proportions. To succeed in nego-tiations, you must understand the needs, wants, and motivations of your counterpart. To understand those needs, you must hear. To hear, you must listen.

Reprinted with permission from IT'S NEGOTIABLE, by P.B. Stark. Copyright 1994

Here's a quote for you :

"You can see a lot, just by listening."
(Yogi Berra)

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