How to make your business relationships work for you

Christopher Jones-Warner FCSI explains how you can adopt a simple technique to make your relationships work.

I am sitting on the sofa with my wife, listening to her telling me how her day has been. I am patient and I don’t offer any advice; I am the model of a good husband. “YOU’RE NOT LISTENING TO ME!” she explodes and I splutter, “Yes I am!” But her face tells me that I am not.

What’s really going on is that I am mimicking my father. When he listens to my mother, his legs are often crossed, though straight, and he sits up while looking down at the floor as he considers what my mother is saying, preparing to offer to her the appropriate ‘guidance’. I find that, subconsciously, while listening to my wife, I have adopted his posture and am giving her no eye contact as she recounts her day’s events. Whether or not I am listening, her experience is that I am not.

Realising my mistake I consciously look at my wife and listen as she speaks to me. Just by my choosing to look at her as she speaks to me changes her demeanour. This is listening with your eyes. At a subliminal level she experiences being listened to and being heard. She appreciates that I understand what’s going on for her and that’s all she wants. Not my advice or opinions. She just wants to be heard. She and I experience being related, once more.

It’s simple. Cause and effect. No magic. Put it in and it works.

Imagine that I recommend to you an exceptional Delia Smith cake recipe. Excitedly, you get hold of the exact ingredients and follow Delia’s instructions to the letter, cooking at the precise temperature and times. What do you get? The cake. Next week you repeat your baking and again, you follow every instruction punctiliously. You get, once more, the cake. The following week, however, you are a little pushed and are short of some ingredients. You make some substitutions and turn up the heat. What do you get? The not cake. Yes, a cake of sorts but, it is not the cake described in the recipe.
If you follow the recipe, precisely, you get the cake. Every time. We know that to land a spacecraft on the moon at a particular moment, we need to do certain things at certain thrusts for certain durations and the landing will take place within seconds of the predicted time. For that’s how the universe works. Cause and effect.

And that’s how relationships work too. If you press the right buttons you will get the desired effects. Hardly any of us are trained in how we as human beings really work, however, and in fact, we are conditioned to press the wrong buttons.

The randomness of relationships arises from your not having found out where the other person is really coming from. You achieve this by conscious listening.

How you listen to someone will determine more than anything how your relationship with them goes. Once someone experiences being heard by you your influence with them and theirs with you will increase enormously and you will experience a connectedness that will transcend many adverse circumstances.

Unless you listen consciously, however, your brain will default to a less effective form of listening which actually prevents strong relationship.

To make sense of our complex world your brain uses inductive reasoning (inferring of general law from particular instances) to identify patterns in life. This enable you to survive situations, events and people. These patterns are our beliefs, judgements and opinions and when we communicate with someone we subconsciously seek validation of our judgements about them so that we can succeed with them.

That is, when I am talking to you, I am really listening to the voice in my head judging what you are saying and I’m not listening to you. And my questions to you arise from my need to file you appropriately in my head rather than from any particular interest in you. What’s that like for you?

Do you experience being heard? Hardly. I was not listening to you while I was confirming my opinions about you and am not really aware of what is going on for you. It is unlikely that you will wish to take our relationship further. You won’t buy from me.

In the eighties and nineties we commuted into the City in trains that should have been first, restored and second, placed in a museum. The windows let in drafts; would drop open when it was raining and the heaters came on in summer. When trains were delayed or cancelled and the staff were indifferent we became angry about the trains and the company that ran them. But when the staff were seen to be doing everything they could to alleviate the situation our anger dissipated, to be replaced by sympathy, yes, but also empathy.

In the City, wealth managers are seeking to regain the trusted adviser status they lost when they failed to communicate with their clients adequately during the financial crisis. One area they consider ripe for improvement is online services. While the online interface is woefully inadequate, particularly for the web-savvy high net worth clients coming through, it is unlikely that wealth management systems will ever be good enough. Yes, we can concentrate on systems, but even if we do, will clients experience being heard and appreciated?

In our day-to-day work, how can we listen in a way that gets our clients and colleagues to experience being heard? The method is remarkably simple but the practice has to overcome a life-time’s conditioning to do otherwise:

1. Shut up (perhaps after you have asked a question);
2. Listen to them and not to the voice in your head. Listen to get into their world (and not where your brain is trying to file them);
3. Be aware of what the voice in your head is saying, however, as its nature will identify to you how you would listen if listening unconsciously; eg, judgementally, critically, etc. Any judgement or opinions that you carry are barriers to relationship;
4. Ignore the voice in your head and, repeatedly ignore it, putting your attention back on the person you are with;
5. Get present to what they feel; listen with your eyes.

Madelyn Burley-Allen in her book ‘Listening’ describes Empathetic Listening thus: “Listeners refrain from judging the talker and place themselves in the other’s position, attempting to see things from his or her point of view. Some characteristics of this level (of listening)include being aware and in the present moment; acknowledging and responding; not letting oneself be distracted; paying attention to the speaker’s total communication, including body language; being empathetic to the speaker’s feelings and thoughts and suspending one’s own thoughts and feelings to give attention solely to listening. Empathetic listening requires an OK-OK attitude. It also requires that the listener show both verbally and nonverbally that he or she is truly listening. The overall focus is to listen from the heart, which opens the doorway to understanding, caring and empathy.”

If you succeed in this (like all things, it is a practice) clients and colleagues will experience that you understand and appreciate them, and you will each experience a connectedness and mutual trust that sales techniques fail to achieve. Such active listening is as powerful on the phone as in the meeting room and is the foundation of successful relationship.

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