A great big shout out to the terrific wedding professionals of the New England Wedding Professionals for being such a responsive audience during my presentation on Interactive Listening. Those folks know how to listen! Growing leaps and bounds nationally and internationally, you really should check out their fan page
It’s How You Say It
You know that being a good communicator is essential to having a successful wedding business, right. To quote sage marketing savvy, people do business with people they know, like and trust. If you don’t connect with your brides and quickly get to know them, they won’t hire you.
Once hired, they won’t be satisfied unless you can extract all their hidden needs and deal easily with their explicit ones. So learning to be a better listener is your ticket to not only more clients, but more satisfied clients. Of course, you know how to listen. It’s as natural as breathing. But, the real question is: are you a good listener? Like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder. Still, you can improve your odds.
The ABCs of Interactive Listening
Listening is an active task, although it seems quite passive. You have a role to play- to encourage the speaker and create understanding as a listener. I’m guessing, without knowing, that you’ve probably either taken an active listening course or at least heard the basic rules of good listening. Let’s see there’s:
- focusing on the speaker
- showing interest with your eye contact and body language
- asking questions that help the speaker be clearer
- demonstrating understanding by paraphrasing facts and feelings
- eliminating barriers to speaking
By far, the hardest skill is focusing. There are so many distractions: the phone, email, surfing the web, your thoughts, etc. But make no mistake if you’re doing anything else besides giving your full attention to the speaker, you’re giving a bad listening experience, which just plain feels yucky and damages trust.
When someone asks you to listen, a current bride or a potential client, she is essentially saying to you, ‘I trust that you will see me, hear my issue and help me.’ What a wonderful compliment. And, opportunity to build even closer ties. All that good stuff is wasted if you don’t respond with focus, compassion and help.
What’s Your Listening Purpose
One thought about the help thing- that doesn’t always mean what you might think. It doesn’t mean offering commentary from your own experiences i.e. ‘when that happened to me, I…’ or suggestions i.e ‘if I were you I’d…’ that may actually block the speaker from continuing.
You see doing that usurps the speaker’s authority and substitutes your judgment instead. Yes, that bride did hire you for your expertise but that doesn’t mean she wants it all the time. One of your goals as a good listener is to figure out what your purpose is in any conversation. What does the speaker want you to do: comfort, reflect or brainstorm?
Comfort- offering a safe space for the speaker to vent. The trick here is to recognize that’s what your bride wants (or ask) and not let your problem-solving nature dominate. Your job is to listen and empathize. Not endlessly, though. You can gently remind your bride that she wants a great wedding and you need to spend time taking action on that, too.
Reflect- acting as a mirror reflecting back the thoughts, feelings and words to the speaker. Your job is to paraphrase back her words and ask non-leading questions that help her gain clarity about what she wants or needs. Don’t forget to help her connect to her feelings as well. Saying something like, ‘I can see that you are really [insert feeling] about that. Is that true?’ will help your bride get clear about the whirlwind of emotions that come with planning a wedding. Sure, there’s happiness and excitement, but weddings also spark fear, sadness, grief, competitiveness in people,too.
Brainstorm- generating resources and workable solutions to the problem at hand. This is a no-brainer for you because this is what you do. However, listening deeper, asking for more clarifications and explanations will help you create an ever better solution so don’t rest on your laurels. That ‘you’re amazing’ moment is what drives satisfaction and referrals!
How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
A man asks a cab driver, ‘how do you get to Carnegie Hall?’. Practice, practice, practice replies the driver. Same is true for you. If you want to be a skillful listener (and you do, believe me), then you have to break bad habits and instill new ones.
Challenge yourself to ask more encouraging questions like ‘Can you say more about that’ or ‘When you say classy, what does that mean to you?’. Stop yourself from being a presumptive listener (you know after 5 words you’re already formulating your response.) Get curious!
A Listening Series?
We had such a lively conversation at the NEWP meeting I’m seriously thinking of doing a series of teleclasses on listening: skill-building, Q & A, and a practice session . Let me know in the comments if that’s something you’d be interested in. What listening challenge bugs you the most?
PS I also want to send a great big thank you to Teal Sallen of Art of the Event for role-playing with me last night. What a good sport- she let me try out my worst listening behaviors on her and took them with a smile. I’d work with her as my decor designer in a heartbeat!
