We entered Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in Jerusalem one winter day to discuss our business strategy with a tech evangelist who was cordial enough to give us 30 minutes of his valuable time. When faced with such a small block of time, getting to the point is of the utmost importance.
As a trio of entrepreneurs focused on building our company as a sustainable bootstrapped software company that is hyper-focused on empowering call centers to increase their meaningful conversations, we are very focused on voice quality, and speech.
This focus drives us to ensure the sound that leaves an agents mouth, gets wrapped up in data packets and shot across the world for the receiver to unwrap those packets and hear what was said. Yet sound is only a small part of what builds a meaningful conversation.
Some of us had the fortune to attend a class on public speaking or required speech therapy to ensure our thoughts were converted to speech properly. There are tons of services and classes that we spend buckets of cash to enhance our formal communication skills in reading, writing and speech.
With nearly 80 percent of our conscious lives communicating it would seemingly be a worthwhile undertaking. Yet in this effort, we are literally spending all our efforts on sending quality voice packets but none on receiving them.
Your attention deficit when listening may not be completely your fault ( mostly, not completely ). We have the mental capacity to listen to someone speaking 400 words per minute, yet the average person speaks about 125 words per minute.
So what do we do the 75% of wasted brain power when some is talking to us? If you’re like me, perhaps you are already trying to solve the problem the speaker has just communicated, or wondering if you properly closed the Doritos bag after last nights Netflix binge.
What it actually means is that we have to really focus on the speaker and focus our attention on the act of listening, failure to do so, and we’re thinking about quotes from Jack Handy.
The average listener of your call or presentation has only heard and retained about 50% of what what you actually said.. Fast forward 48 hours and of that 50% well there goes another 50%, in the end, your audience has only heard and retained about 25% of what you actually said.
As the tech evangelist spoke about where to focus our market and technologies, we hung on every word, inspired and eager to gain just a piece of this knowledge not knowing when and if we would have this opportunity again. After 30 minutes of hanging on his words and analysis, we were so thankful for his time and of course thanked him. He responded with an unexpected, “thanks for listening”. I was humbled by the response and adopted the phrase and use it after every good conversation.
In the calls we make and the conversations we have everyday, start the conversation with the intention of being present. Put down your smart phone, silence distractions, and make an active decision to be a present and an active listener and attempt to exceed the 25% of information you are used to retaining.
So the next time you are listening to someone, pay attention to where your mind is wondering and force the slippery bugger of attention back at the speaker. And the next time you find someone doing the hard work and actively listening, thank him for listening, after all he made the best use of your time and his.
Thank you for listening.
