A recent survey indicated that 70% of people think they’re above-average listeners and believe those around them are below average. If you know anything about math, you know this can’t be true. So how can you tell if you really are a good listener? Laura Janusik, a.k.a. Hashtag Dr. J. Listen, can help you find out. Laura is a Ph.D., MBA, CLP, and the CEO of Listening to Change. Laura’s background includes 15 years of corporate experience and over 20 years as a professor and researcher of listening. Leveraging her vast knowledge, Laura helps coaches, salespeople, and business leaders develop better relationships through the power of listening.
Laura is known worldwide as a leading expert in teaching and training listening. Her Ph.D. in communications and her MBA assist her in using research-based information to help people become better listeners and gain desired results, such as better relationships, increased sales, or more trust. Her research and ideas have been published nationally and internationally and cited in such publications as Forbes, Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, and US News and World Report.
Recently, our own Michael Neuendorff, another staunch advocate of better listening, sat down with Laura for an animated discussion about the art of listening and its role in helping executive coaches expand their practice.
Michael Neuendorff: Listening is essential in all conversations, but what about the coaching conversation? How does listening play a crucial role in the coaching conversation?
Laura Janusik: That’s a great question. As you and most coaches know, you get the job done primarily through two skills: asking great questions and listening. And if you are weak in either of those two skills, you’re not going to become a great coach. As you move up the scale of coaching and get more certifications, listening takes on a different meaning. What you can do with it, what it is. I always ask coaches to think about the first time they went to a coaching class. People will say: “well, they said listening is important, and I thought, what’s the big deal? I’ve been listening since I was born.” But once you learn different ways to listen in coaching, you recognize that it’s much more challenging than what you’ve been doing since you were born. There are lots of other ways to do it as well. So even though coaches get more training than most people, their training is only the tip of the iceberg.
Michael Neuendorff: You seem to be keenly interested in helping coaches improve their listening skills because I know that you offer courses specifically for coaches. Why this particular interest in the coaching conversation?
Laura Janusik: I love coaches! I have over 20 years of experience researching listening, training in listening and trying to improve my own listening. I like that listening ends in “ing” because it means it’s always present. I accept that I’m never going to become an expert listener, but every day I get to practice and improve my listening skills. I understand how listening contributes to the qualities of relationships. The quality of listening determines the quality of the relationship. Once you understand this, you can approach your listening differently, and your relationships change. So, when I got out of academia, I wanted to use my background in listening to help people. You can’t be an educator and not be a helper, and I am definitely a helper. I could have become a coach myself but realized that if I can help coaches and they help many people, I’ll indirectly help so many more people. That’s why I’m so excited about working with coaches. They already understand that listening is important and eager to do it better because it makes them a better coach.
Michael Neuendorff: That’s so true. Coaches inherently know they need to be great listeners to do what they do. Beyond that awareness, what do you think coaches need to know about the value of listening?
Laura Janusik: I’m not sure that the term I would use would be the “value of listening. Understanding that what you learn in coach training, while it’s very good, is just the tip of the iceberg. There is much more to know about listening because listening has been researched from several perspectives. I come from the communication perspective, but I’m very well versed in the psychological, helping, and spiritual perspectives of listening. Once you recognize that listening is a lot of things, as opposed to this one thing you learned in coach training, you realize that you can do it differently, better, and more skillfully.
Michael Neuendorff: What are some quick tips you would give a coach who wants to improve their listening skills right away?
Laura Janusik: One of the quick tips is this idea of “holding space.” I frequently have coaches, often beginning coaches, going for their ACCs, getting their first 100 hours. They ask, “how do I keep my mouth shut?” Because they want to help. Most of us are conditioned to think of helping as offering an answer. But in coaching, of course, it’s pulling the answers out of them and giving them the time and space to identify their own solutions. So, I think the first thing is this idea of holding space, and one of the ways to become more comfortable with that is the 3-second pause.
There’s a reason it’s 3 seconds. Research suggests that we tend to respond in about half a second. So, once you quit talking, I will respond within half a second. That’s shorter than I need to figure out what I’m thinking. We also know through research that about 3 seconds is where people start getting uncomfortable. When people get uncomfortable, what do they do? They start talking. I recommend biting your thumb or doing another physical action to yourself so you know what you’re doing. If you, as the coach, can learn to hold space for at least 3 seconds, chances are the other person will break the silence, give you more information and help figure it out for themselves. That’s the first tip that I have for coaches. 
The second tip is: what do you do after you learn to hold space? What do you do with the silence? Start listening to the nonverbals and feeling what’s going on in the room, then bring that to those quality questions you ask.
The third thing is to understand that people process information differently, which means we listen differently. We prefer some information over others. That’s called “listening filters” or “listening dominances,” and it’s some of the most recent research published in 2012. If you understand what listening filters are, you can better learn to speak your client’s language so that you phrase questions in a way that resonates with them more. This understanding will facilitate a faster transformation.
The fourth thing would be to create a foundation in your coaching meetings where you set the expectation of silence. “I’m going to ask you some questions that you probably don’t know the answer to right off the top of your head; that’s absolutely fine. Take as much time as you need before you respond. The silence is expected and good because it helps you think.”
Michael Neuendorff: You mentioned that after 3 seconds, people start to get uncomfortable. I like that idea because we do seek to make people uncomfortable in coaching conversations. If we remain in our comfort zone, we may not break through to a new insight, an awareness, or a discovery. So I like the idea of using that 3-second pause as one way to help our clients get a little uncomfortable.
Coaches love to read books. If there’s a group that loves to read books, it’s coaches. I listen to many books myself. Are there any books you recommend to help coaches improve their listening skills?
Laura Janusik Yeah, there are. I believe in listening-backed research. The listening that we do in a coaching situation should be supported through research on listening. A mass-market book that I think is quite good in giving a broad overview, as well as listening specifics, is called You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters by Kate Murphy. She researched many different people and recounted their research stories in that book. I particularly like that book because of the research focus.
Within a coaching context, I like Nancy Klein’s work. I read her first book, Time to Think, probably over 20 years ago. She’s since written at least three more books. Her latest book, The Promise that Changes Everything, is about ways to stop interrupting when speaking or listening. I like her books because she’s a coach. She also has her own coaching institute where she trains people to allow others to have that time to think. You and I discussed before this interview that we both also like to listen to things. I like podcasts by Oscar Trimboli, called Deep Listening, where he interviews some amazing people. His podcasts are not coaching-specific per se. Still, they help coaches, or any individual, understand how listening is used in many professions. It’s a great way to borrow ideas from other occupations.
Michael Neuendorff: That sounds really interesting. Thank you for those recommendations. I’ve heard you say in some of our conversations, and by watching your videos, that listening is a behavior. I’ve often thought of listening as a skill. Can you delve into that just a little bit for us and explain?
Laura Janusik: I don’t like to think of a listening skill because often, people think of a “skill” as being analogous to a tool. For example, you can use a set of pliers or a hammer in different situations, and they will work. They may not work as effectively. I like to think of listening as a “strategy,” so you figure out what you want from it. What’s your end goal here? Then you use the listening skills that are most appropriate to meet your end goal. Listening is also a behavior because listening isn’t just about sitting quietly. It’s about what you’re doing strategically in your brain, how you respond with your body, and how you will respond with your words. Since listening is composed of all those areas, it really is a behavior.
What surprises coaches all the time is that there’s absolutely no research worldwide that any listening behavior ties to what’s happening in the brain. We often learn that active listening, such as eye contact, head nodding, etc., is important. However, that doesn’t mean the person is listening. People may use nonverbal behaviors to show respect, but they might not have anything going on cognitively. That’s why listening is a verbal behavior. When you respond to someone, you can understand how they listen to you or how you listen to them.
Michael Neuendorff: But it seems to me that it’s not something that you apply or turn on as more of a way of being.
Laura Janusik: It’s a way of being, but it’s also something you turn on. One of the things I say when I work with coaches is: “Do you listen to your spouse or partner or your children the same way that you listen in a coaching session?” 100% of the time, they respond: “No, I don’t have as much patience with them. I don’t allow them to figure it out.” You will turn on different attributes depending on the context you’re using. And I think coaching is a great example because you’re thinking about that strategic endgame of a coaching session, allowing the client to figure it out. So you’re always asking questions and then keeping silent to let them do that. 
Michael Neuendorff: What else would you recommend that a coach should do to go deeper towards becoming a great listener?
Laura Janusik: I love working with coaches. The resistance with coaches can be because their eyes were so open to listening when they took their coach training; they think they know what listening is. They understand listening much more than the rest of the population; I can see that. But they don’t recognize that listening comes from so many different disciplines. We look at and study listening and communication in spirituality and the helping professions, psychology, and neuroscience. Many coaches are using an LP. There’s much more to know about listening and how the brain takes in information and operates. Understanding how that works is essential for a coaching situation because it can help the coach figure out which way to move strategically.
Michael Neuendorff: When someone has studied the art of listening and sought to apply what they’ve learned, how will they know when they truly become a better listener?
Laura Janusik: That’s a great question. First, you know because other people tell you you’re a good listener. What if people aren’t telling you that? Then I would challenge your listening coaches to do this: go to three people in your life and ask three questions: “What do I do well as a listener? What don’t I do well as a listener? And what should I do to listen better?” Whenever I have people do this as an assignment, they come back really surprised because they don’t realize what other people are noticing about them as a listener.
Michael Neuendorff: I’m guessing very few coaches have ever asked those questions. From conversations with you, I understand that only 2% of the general population has actually taken “listening training,” not listening as part of a generalized training program. Only about 2% of the population. Is that right?
Laura Janusik: That is correct. And coaches do get some education in listening. So that makes them part of that 2%, automatically making them better listeners than the average person. But there’s so much more to know and apply. It’s not just knowing it but using it.
Michael Neuendorff: Very much so. Coaches do have the option to apply almost daily what they’re learning about listening improvement. Is there anything else that you’d like to share with our readers? The question that I may not have asked in coaching, we often sometimes say: “What’s a question I should have asked you that I didn’t ask?”
Laura Janusik: I encourage coaches to think about listening within a context. Some of the classes I’ve taught in the past look at listening within a context. The perfect example is different cultures have different nonverbal behaviors that indicate listening. So, if you’re working with clients from different cultures, it’s crucial to understand some of those norms. If you don’t, you are going to make incorrect assumptions. For example, there are several cultures where nodding your head up and down means “no,” and shaking your head from side-to-side means “yes:” the exact opposite of what those motions mean to us. So, imagine speaking to someone from that culture and walking away with the exact opposite meaning of what they were trying to tell you. Another culturally linked aspect of communication is how long we take to respond. That’s called turn-taking. That’s different in various cultures as well.
Another area that I like to talk about is listening and empathy. Research supports that. There are three particular listening behaviors that you can do to demonstrate empathy. If you want to be perceived as being more empathetic by your clients, you need to know what those three behaviors are, and you would want to start using them. Once we start looking at contextualizing and listening for what you want to use it for strategically, there’s so much more to learn out there.
Michael Neuendorff: That was a terrific response to: “what should I have asked you?” Well, thank you very much for answering that question. And for all of the wonderful information that you shared with us. For coaches who would like to go deeper, and that should be just about every one of you, visit Dr. Laura’s website to learn more about her courses and coaching. She coaches people on how to improve their listening too. So thank you very much for talking with me today, Laura.
Laura Janusik: Thank you, Michael. I enjoyed it a lot.
You can watch the video version of this interview by clicking this link.
Take a look at our other Conversations with Coaches here, and view the full YouTube playlist here.
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