Reflective Listening and Setting Workplace Boundaries

Carolyn, from Seattle, Washington, sent in the following question:

 …I know that you spend a lot of time in your book discussing the importance of reflective listening. I have been trying to practice the steps for listening reflectively as you explain them. Body language first, emotion second, reflecting third, words fourth. It really does give me a lot to think about, this reflective listening. Funny thing is, the better I get at listening the more I notice how bad other people are at listening. I have this guy at work and he never listens, which is probably why he always has to have everything repeated six times. I swear the man never shuts up. He keeps talking even when my body language is saying, “Look I am busy. I am working. I am not giving you my attention.” I feel rude ignoring him, but he doesn’t even notice, and if I don’t ignore him I get drawn into some conversation I don’t want to have. Anyway, here is my question. Now that I am getting better at listening to others, how do I get other people to listen to me? I mean, listen to my body language? How can I get him to shut up and notice that I am not listening to him 90% of the time?

Greeting Carolyn,

Unfortunately, you are not alone in your frustration. I am sorry to say that many people report noticing the poor listening skills of others as soon as they begin to improve their own listening kills.

First, recognize this as a good thing. You are beginning to notice how bad others are at listening because your own ability to listen is improving. You are noticing how often people fail to gain favorable attention before talking. These people end up endlessly talking to themselves, and complaining when nobody ever seems to hear them. Frustrating I know, but you do have a few options:

One: You could get angry and frustrated, or you could try to keep some perspective. I recommend the second of the two. Remember that you cannot change others; you can only change yourself and your reactions to others. Whenever you find yourself getting frustrated, simply ask yourself if there is any action that you could take that might ease the situation. You’ll find that asking that simple question will begin to lessen your frustration and allow you to focus on what you control.

Here are two possible solutions:

Can you reclaim and control your space? It is very hard to work with interrupters when you can’t close an office door, so try to do any work that requires focus in a location where interrupters can’t get at you easily.

Don’t be afraid to politely point out interruptions. Most people who interrupt are so busy with their own thoughts that they are not even aware that they are interrupting. You need to set boundaries capable of stopping interrupters in their tracks. Keep your focus and continue to do the work that you have been doing, however do say something like, “Hang on, I need to work on this and I can’t listen to you and finish this at the same time.” If they keep talking or interrupt again, simply repeat that you can’t listen to them and finish your work at same time.

You need to keep this up every time they interrupt until they finally start to notice your body language and begin to not interrupt.

Finally, if your interrupter still doesn’t catch on, you can use your own voice to help you stay focused. Example, suppose I am writing a letter and someone doesn’t notice that I am busy and asks me a question. I simply begin to speak my thoughts out loud as I type. In this way, I show people that my mind is busy and not able to listen to them. Often they will wait quietly without my even having to ask them.

You will find several places in my book where I write more about setting boundaries—in chapters nine, ten, eleven, and thirteen. Review and practice these techniques in the same way that you have been practicing your listening skills. You will develop the ability to set polite boundaries in no time and your coworker will be less able to frustrate you.

Let me know if you have any questions, and thanks for writing in.

Lynn Marie Sager

I once had a student who was so frustrated with her husband that she was considering leaving him…

She wanted to know what I thought. I asked her to explain the specific cause of her frustration.

“He always expects me to do everything,” she told me. “I always have to pick up after him. He never picks up anything for himself. He comes home, opens a bag of chips, eats two and leaves the bag on the table for me to pick up. I’ve tried talking to him, but he doesn’t care what I want. He tells me to just hire a maid, but I don’t want to waste money on a maid. Besides, what maid will follow around behind him picking up his messes? A maid only comes once a week.”

“You want him to pick up after himself?”

“Yes.”

“You have talked to him about what you want?”

“Every day.”

“You’ve been married for eight years. For eight years, you’ve been saying the same thing; and for eight years, he hasn’t been paying attention?”

“Yes!”

Well no wonder she was frustrated. “If explaining to him what you want the first time didn’t create the effect you want, and the second time didn’t create the effect you want, and the third, and the fourth,” I asked, “then what makes you think that explaining to him what you want the thousandth time will create a different effect?”

As she realized her own illogic, she started to giggle.

She had made the same presentation to the same person over 24,000 times, and she had received the same response. Her experience was a classic case of cause and effect. She hadn’t changed her presentation, so she had no reason to expect a different effect. Her husband defined her actions as nagging, and she nearly believed him. But I define nagging as misunderstanding the nature of cause and effect.

If your boat keeps crashing, then perhaps you should redesign your boat; and if you want a different effect on someone, then perhaps you should change your presentations. The only way to get people to pick up their socks is to make them want to pick up their socks. And while people will seldom “pick up their socks” for your reasons, they will sometimes “pick up their socks” for their own reasons. In order to get the effect she wanted, my student needed to learn the rules of the river. Rules like persuasion and communication. Rules that don’t advocate making the same, ineffective presentation twice.

At this point in my story, people always interrupt to ask, “What did she do?” They want to know her technique, so they can run home and try it for themselves.

Well here, for the record, is “what she did.”

She stopped swimming against the current. She stopped trying to change her husband and learned to change herself.

She learned to use the rules of the river to examine the real cause of her unhappiness. She learned to redefine herself as more than her family’s caretaker. She learned to reflect, focus and strategize before taking action. She learned to allocate her resources and to understand process. She took control of her life. She stopped giving energy to what she hated, and she started giving energy to what she loved. She began to attract, nurture, understand and influence the people around her. She learned to read the river’s currents and to let life flow.

She even learned to use creative delegation and turned her husband’s clutter into a game for her kids. But most importantly, she stopped looking for happiness in the circumstances around her, and she started to discover happiness inside herself. Eventually, my student did find satisfaction, but only when she stopped trying to change the river and started learning to navigate it.

The biggest frustrations encountered on the river usually manifest when we attempt to change how people respond to us. We can’t change people into what they’re not. However, the moment we stop trying to change people, we begin finding the energy to change ourselves. And when we begin to change ourselves, we automatically change the circumstances wherein we find ourselves. We waste so much energy focused on the wrong end of problems.

Stop fixing problems. You can’t fix problems. Problems are effects. They are the natural result of something that was done to cause them. Change the cause of a problem, and the problem will take care of itself.

What causes problems? Failure to persuade; failure to communicate; misunderstanding; fear; doubt; blame; unwanted advice; expecting people to change for your reasons; misinterpreting cause and effect; not understanding the rules of the river.

When you learn to fix the cause of a problem, you will fix that problem’s effect.

Of course, there is a catch. This rule only helps you to solve problems if you can determine where your actions contribute to those problems. Any problem that you can’t influence by your actions is not your problem. Any problem that you can’t influence by your actions is a fact of life, so you might as well get over it.

In other words, “Why doesn’t so-and-so love me?” is not your problem. While, “Why am I letting this situation affect me so much?” is your problem.

“Nobody listens to me,” is not your problem. While, “How can I explain this so people will want to listen?” is your problem.

What other people think, say, or do is not your problem. While what you think, say, or do is your problem.

Can you see the difference?

The only way to change something is to change the cause of that something. So if you want to affect the river, you need to keep peeling away at the causes of things until you find a cause for which you’re responsible and then find a way to affect that cause. Only then will your actions be worthwhile…