Professional Documents
Culture Documents
in your actions.
1. Physical Presence
2. Mental Presence
Getting yourself fully present and focused on what others are saying.
Attending Behaviors
No doubt you will find these skills valuable in your many face-to-face
interactions.
- Squaring: Sit or stand with your shoulders squared to the customer or speaker.
If someone is saying something important, we face them squarely. If you “turn
away” from someone who is speaking, they feel less heard.
- Eye Contact: Hold steady, consistent eye contact with the speaker. Focus on one
eye to give more intense eye contact.
- Leaning: Lean in toward the speaker about 10 degrees to project the intensity of
your interest.
- Facial Gestures: Send the speaker visual cues that you are tracking with them.
Head nods, smiles, a furrowed brow, raised eyebrows, dropping your jaw are signs
that you are listening and understanding.
- Vocal Inflection: Give vocal cues as well as visual cues. This is especially
important on the phone. “Hmm”, “yes”, “ahhh”, “right”, “I see”, “gotcha”, “um hmm”
are vocalizations or expressions that let a speaker know you are listening.
Mental Presence
To be mentally present requires more than just silence when another speaks. You
must clear your mind of extraneous “chatter” and focus intensely on what the
speaker is saying.
When your mind wanders, and you cannot accurately paraphrase, don’t go into self
criticism. Instead, increase your awareness by identifying where your mind
wandered.
If you weren’t listening, see if you can remember what you were thinking about.
Participants in this workshop commonly identify four reasons for not listening
carefully enough to paraphrase completely:
1. You were listening…but only to prepare what you would say when it
3. Your mind simply drifted into a day dream about something entirely
unrelated.
4. You have no idea where you “went.” (You draw a complete blank
Meta-cognition:
Our ability to monitor our own thought process — our awareness of our own
thinking. When we are able to reflect on our own reasoning process, we can
consciously intervene and change our own thinking.
The mind is split into two functions: one continues the normal mental processes,
the other monitors thinking at a “meta” level. The process helps deepen our
understanding of the sources of our behavior.
Expanding Awareness:
Awareness of our own defensive behavior often occurs before we are able to curb
the behavior. Before a change in behavior, the inner-observer can observe, “Wow,
am I ever defensive here today!” Gradually, the level of awareness evolves to
initiate new behavior and urge the defensive self to ‘ask a question’. Since
defensiveness commonly exhibits itself through explanatory statements, a good
first step is to ask the other person a question and then paraphrase the answer.
Simply asking questions dramatically eases the exchange.
Silence
through the noise to find the signal of what others really mean.
3. See the silence of your conversation not as dead silence, not as
One of our strongest allies in being mentally present is to hold our silence
longer than is comfortable.
Listen