Listen Like You Mean It
Reclaiming the Lost Art of True Connection
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“Full of revealing, instantly applicable ideas for leveraging your strengths and overcoming your weaknesses.”
—Adam Grant, author of Think Again and Originals, and host of the TED podcast WorkLife
For many of us, listening is simply something we do on autopilot. We hear just enough of what others say to get our work done, maintain friendships, and be polite with our neighbors. But we miss crucial opportunities to go deeper—to give and receive honest feedback, to make connections that will endure for the long haul, and to discover who people truly are at their core.
Fortunately, listening can be improved—and Ximena Vengoechea can show you how. In Listen Like You Mean It, she offers an essential listening guide for our times, revealing tried-and-true strategies honed in her own research sessions and drawn from interviews with marriage counselors, podcast hosts, life coaches, journalists, filmmakers, and other listening experts. Through Vengoechea’s set of scripts, key questions, exercises, and illustrations, you’ll learn to:
• Quickly build rapport with strangers
• Ask the right questions to deepen a conversation
• Pause at the right time to encourage vulnerability
• Navigate a conversation that’s gone off the rails
Now more than ever, we need to feel heard, connected, and understood in a world that keeps turning up the volume. Warm, funny, and immensely practical, this book shows you how.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Vengoechea, a user experience research manager at Pinterest and columnist for Fast Company, debuts with a straightforward take on changing the way one listens in order to create better connections. Vengoechea writes of routinely conducting in-person research as a means to better understanding "the people who use or could someday use the various products we build" and shares how she gets research participants to open up. Crucial to this is leaving behind the practice of "surface listening," or passive listening where one hears the "literal—but not emotional—content of a conversation," in favor of empathetic listening, which requires paying attention to the needs of one's conversation partners (such as through the pace and intensity of conversation) and creating a safe space for meaningful exchanges. She also offers various exercises to test one's listening approaches (one can conduct an "energy audit" to notice times when one spaces out or gets distracted) and tools to improve upon listening deficiencies, such as "ear training" tips for noticing the pitch, pacing, volume, expressiveness, rhythm, and tone of one's conversation partner. She also gives advice on how to navigate difficult conversation ("set aside devices" and "don't be afraid to pivot"), manage distractions, and approach sensitive subjects ("venture outdoors" and "break eye contact"). This zestful guide will inspire readers to listen better.
