James B. Pepper Rutland, MMR Group, How to Listen

No one likes being interrupted. Nothing is worse than being in a productive state of conversational flow, explaining yourself with such fluidity that it almost seems like thoughts and words are coming to you on their own, only to have someone kill the whole process by jumping in with their own half-baked interjection. Yet when it’s our turn to do the interrupting, we tend to completely ignore the frustration we had felt just some hours before when we were on the receiving end. The only way to end this vicious cycle is to become better listeners, ones that resist the universal urge to mentally drift away from what others are saying. Below we go over a few ways to listen without interrupting.

Make Eye Contact

In the age of smartphones and micro-length attention spans, being of the receiving end of focused eye contact seems like a rare commodity. Half the time, I’m expecting someone to just be staring down at their screen while I talk to them. It’s rather hard to mentally float away while looking at someone’s eyes, making it a great focusing tool if you want to be a better listener. Making eye contact when someone’s talking to you will also ensure the speaker feels valued, helping to further your relationship with them.

Learn to Wait

It’s especially hard to not interrupt, I mean interject, in the middle of a conversation when a great idea hits you. However, it’s a much better idea to respect the speaker and at least wait until they’re done expressing their idea before sharing yours. If inspiration strikes you mid-sentence, set your thought to the side so you can go back to it later. Whether this means making a quick note on your phone, a notebook or even the back of your hand, by not interrupting right away you’ll actually have a great way to continue the conversation once the other person has stopped speaking.

Stay Humble

A lot of our desire to interrupt often comes from how great we believe our interjecting thoughts are. Often, we wholeheartedly believe that the other person will find them as impressive as we do, so we can’t wait to share them. What we often ignore is that the other person probably feels the same way about the thoughts they’re sharing with us. A little bit of humility can help us keep this in perspective and allow us to become better and more respectful listeners.