Hi, my name's Sarah and in this squiggly shortcut, I'm going to be talking about how to listen

like you mean it. And let's start with a stat. So 90% of us think that we are good listeners,

but we retain about 20% of what we listened to. So there is a listening gap that most of us have. It's actually quite rare for us to

overestimate our capabilities. Usually we're our own worst critics. But when it comes to listening,

I think we all like to think we are better than we are. So it's probably a skill that most of us

could get a bit better at. So I'm going to talk to you about some ways

to do that that I'm working on to at the same time, hopefully, as all of you. So the first one

is when you are listening, notice what is not being said. So when we're listening, it's not

just about the words. It's also sort of looking and

noticing, like, who isn't contributing, who is maybe getting cut off, who perhaps starts to

speak, but then gets spoken over, or just what do you not hear? So do you not hear any challenge in a conversation? If you're really listening, if you're listening out for challenge and you don't hear any disagreement, maybe that's a prompt to ask a different kind of question. So notice what's not being said. So sort of listen to things that are almost invisible, maybe more about sort of body language or just the words

that are not being said or the questions that are not being asked.

Second, remember the power of the pause. So I think this is probably the thing that gets

in the way of listening the most is the pressure to respond. You know, we're all thinking

about what we're going to say next or

the question that we want to ask or we're trying to get in our point of view, you know, trying to find

space to speak. And I think if we can take away the pressure to respond straight away and know

that it is okay to pause, then you can really focus on listening to what someone is saying.

If your aim is to be present and like really, my aim is to remember 90% of this conversation,

you are really going to listen rather than kind of letting your head wonder off to

then what are you going to go and say? Maybe set yourself a goal of like, how much of this

conversation do I want to remember? Because I think that intention will then just naturally

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