1. The Art & Science
of Listening
Listening skills for effective communication in the
context of emotional intelligence
Lifestage, Inc
www.lifestage.org

2. C
The five domains
of emotional intelligence:
ommunication
• Knowing your emotions.
• Managing your own
emotions.
• Motivating yourself.
• Recognizing and
understanding other people's
emotions.
• Managing relationships, i.e.,
managing the emotions of
others.
Daniel Goleman, Working With Emotional
Intelligence, Bantam Books 2006

3. Trust & understanding are
fundamental forces
in human interaction
Establishing trust
Emotional Intelligence
enables us to appreciate and is about listening
develop the vital
connections between self,
and receiving
others, purpose, meaning, what others are
existence, life and the world
as a whole, and to help
expressing - not
others do the same. necessarily
agreeing.
• “Emotional Intelligence”
www.businessballs.com/eq.htm

4. Individuals who score
higher in the ability to
perceive accurately,
understand, and appraise
others’ emotions are
better able to respond
flexibly to changes in their
social environments and
build supportive social
networks.
Peter Salovey et al, “Coping Intelligently:
Emotional Intelligence and the Coping Process”
Coping:
The Psychology of What Works
C. R. Snyder, ed, Oxf

5. Well-developed listening skills open
the door to:
Greater cohesion among team
or group members;
Greater productivity with fewer
mistakes;
Increased sharing of
information that in turn can
lead to more
creative and innovative work;
www.skillsyouneed.co.uk/IPS/Lis
tening_Skills.html

6. Listening is the most fundamental
component of interpersonal
communication
Listening is not something
that just happens, it is an
active process in which a
conscious decision is
made to listen to and
understand the messages
of the speaker.
• “The skills you need”
www.skillsyouneed.co.uk/IPS/active_l
istening.html#ixzzsMpHTGa5Y

7. If a tree falls in the forest and there’s
no one there to hear it…
•Listening
the process of receiving,
constructing meaning
from,
and responding
to spoken and/or
nonverbal
messages.
International Listening Association, 1996 www.listen.org

8. Listening is the connective tissue of
relationships
“Listening is a magnetic
and strange thing, a
creative force. The friends
who listen to us are the
ones we move toward.
When we are listened to,
it creates us, makes us
unfold and expand.”
Brenda Ueland

9. Listening is the conscious
directing of attention
• Listening is about attention to
the words and the music of
other people and our
interactions with them.
• Attention is an integration of
mental, emotional and
physical processes.
• The ability to direct and
sustain attention is a skill that
anyone can develop and is
more directly related to
emotional intelligence than
IQ.

10. Types of attention
“When you actually pay attention
to something you’re listening to,
whether it is your favorite song or
the cat meowing at dinnertime, a “Simple” or “startle” as
separate “top-down” neural
pathway comes into play. Here, when hearing an
the signals are conveyed through unexpected noise;
a dorsal pathway in your cortex,
part of the brain that does more
computation, which lets you Stimulus-directed – as
actively focus on what you’re when we hear our
hearing and tune out sights and
sounds that aren’t as immediately name called or a
important.” favorite song
• Seth Horowitz, “The Science and Art of Listening” New
York Times, November 9, 2012

11. The “music” of a person is what is
expressed nonverbally
When a team member is not on
the same emotional wavelength
as the rest, the team needs to be
emotionally intelligent vis-à-vis
that individual. In part, that
simply means being aware of
areas of disconnect,
misunderstanding or blocks in
communication. Having a norm
that encourages interpersonal
understanding facilitates this
awareness and provides a
process for dealing with it.
“Building The Emotional Intelligence of Groups” Harvard
Business Review, March 2001

12. “At its core, listening is connecting.”
The ability to Emotionally Intelligent teams
understand the true and groups create norms that
spirit of a message as build trust and a sense of
it is intended to be identity among members.
communicated, and These norms are maintained
demonstrate your through active attentive
listening and response to
understanding, is
what is expressed both
paramount in forming directly and nonverbally:
connections and
leading effectively. “Building The Emotional Intelligence of Groups” Harvard
Business Review, March 2001
• “The Discipline of Listening” Harvard Business Review, June
21, 2012 •

13. Emotional awareness is directly linked
to the ability to focus attention
“When research subjects were
“Perception is influenced asked to retell a brief story
by the emotional state of they had to memorize,
participants in a negative
the observer. In other mood tended to report
words, how we perceive details, whereas participants
the world does not only in a positive mood tended to
depend on what we know report the gist of the story.
of the world, but also by Interestingly, in perceptual
how we feel.” processing, a similar effect is
observed.”
Jolij J, Meurs M (2011) Music Alters Visual
Perception. PLoS ONE 6(4): e18861.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018861

14. Our capacity to learn and to listen is
profoundly impacted
by our emotional state
• In a study of the effectiveness of
Social Emotional Learning (SEL)
to learning, its impact was
strongly seen in shaping
children’s developing neural
circuitry, particularly the
executive functions of the
prefrontal cortex, which manage
working memory – what we
hold in mind as we learn – and
inhibit disruptive emotional
impulses.
http://danielgoleman.info/topics/emotional-
intelligence/

15. Active listening is “involved
listening with a purpose”
• Using all available senses to take
in the verbal and nonverbal • Anyone can improve
expression of others; their active listening
• Paraphrasing what is heard to skills through either
check understanding and ensure experience or training.
accurate perceptions;
Awareness and
• Providing feedback through verbal management of our
and nonverbal responses to the
speaker and the speaker’s own emotional life are
message.
key to active listening.
Listening and Critical Thinking” Fundamentals of Communication
Studies, Chapter 5,
http://highered.mcgraw-
hill.com/sites/dl/free/0073385018/537865/pearson3_sample_ch0
5.pdf

16. When listening to another person:
Set judgments aside to
take in what a person is • Disagree without being
saying disagreeable
Allow others the • Try to understand how
opportunity of a the other person feels,
complete hearing - to go and to discover what
into depth and detail they want to achieve.
without being http://www.businessballs.com/empathy.htm
interrupted

17. Attention is a choice
• “The richness of life doesn’t lie
in the loudness and the beat,
but in the timbres and the
variations that you can discern
• “Listening is a skill
if you simply pay attention. that we’re in danger
• Listen to new music when of losing in a world
jogging rather than familiar
tunes. Listen to your dog’s of digital distraction
whines and barks: he is trying and information
to tell you something isn’t
right. Listen to your significant overload.”
other’s voice — not only to the Seth Horowitz, “The Science and Art of
words, which after a few years Listening” New York Times, November 9, 201
may repeat, but to the sounds
under them, the emotions
carried in the harmonics.”

18. Directing attention is a skill that grows
with practice
•Mindfulness
•Music
•Storytelling
•Metaphors

19. Mindfulness practices strengthen
listening skills
• Stilling the mind involves
not becoming distracted by
our own train of thoughts
so as to remain fully present
with others. Being
completely in the present
moment means giving full
attention to the interaction
with other people. Yoga and
meditation are two
practices that help cultivate
this core listening skill.
“Your Mind At Work: New Ways To Approach Those Niggling
Challenges In The Office” Mindful, April 2013, p. 55

20. Mindfulness cultivates listening skills
– and reduces emotional stress
• Practice following a simple • To reduce frustration with lack
behavior (like slowing down your of progress in self or others:
breathing) or object (like the Listen fully to a longer piece of
flame of a candle). The repeated music without doing anything
return to a focal point trains else. Just listen. This helps train
attention. the mind and emotions to
appreciate rhythms rather than
trying to force things.
• To reduce the irritation of others’
gossip, office politics or difficult
personalities: Let others talk about • “Your Mind At Work: New Ways To
Approach Those Niggling Challenges In
themselves and make it a practice The Office” Mindful, April 2013, p. 55
to silence judgment and listen for
what causes their pain.

21. Music and mood are closely
interrelated
• Listening to a sad or happy
song on the radio can make
us feel more sad or happy.
Such mood changes not only
affect how we feel, they also
influence our perception.
• Listening to music that
improves our own mood
enhances attention and
openness to others.
Jacob Jolij, Maaike Meurs. Music Alters Visual Perception. PLoS ONE,
2011; 6 (4): e18861

22. “In a story, you not only weave a lot of
information into the telling but you
also arouse your listener’s emotion
and energy.”
• “Stories fulfill a
profound human need
to grasp the patterns
of living—not merely
as an intellectual
exercise, but within a
very personal,
emotional
experience.”
“Storytelling That Moves People” Harvard
Business Review, June 2003

23. MRI scans of a person telling a true, personal story
and that of a listener show that when the listener
was engaged brain activity mirrored that of the
storyteller
WE ARE WIRED TO CONNECT

24. “Neural coupling” occurs in successful
communication
• The findings indicate that
during successful
communication, speakers’ and
listeners’ brains exhibit joint,
temporally coupled, response
patterns. Such neural coupling
substantially diminishes in the
absence of communication,
such as when listening to an
unintelligible foreign language.
“Speaker-listener neural coupling underlies
successful communication” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science Vol. 107 No. 32
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/32/14425.ful
l

25. “When others speak, we typically
divide our attention between what
they are saying now and what they
are going to say next -
For many of us, the opposite of talking
isn’t listening, it’s waiting.”
Daniel Pink, To Sell Is Human, Riverhead Books, 2012, p. 190

26. “Listening is the quality control of
communications.”
“Listening with purpose
should be about listening ACTIVE
with the intent to learn,
understand and possibly be
LISTENING
changed because of the
exchange.”
IS PURPOSEFUL
CURIOSITY
Karen Natzel, “Fuel Your Curiosity, Listen With
Purpose”Daily Journal of Commerce, November 27,
2012

27. “I have no
particular
talent. I am
only
passionately
curious.”
Albert Einstein
The New Quotable Einstein, Alice
Calaprice, ed, Princeton
University Press, 2005

28. www.lifestage.org
• Lifestage is a training and consulting company
that designs creative, experiential programs for
personal and professional development. Read
articles by Lifestage trainers at
www.livesinprogressnewsletter.blogspot.com
• To book a training workshop for your group,
organization or staff contact Jude Treder-Wolff at
631-366-4265 or lifestage_2000@yahoo.com