Listen Like You Mean It: Reclaiming the Lost Art of True Connection - Hardcover

Vengoechea, Ximena

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593087054 ISBN 13: 9780593087053

Verlag: Portfolio, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

“Full of revealing, instantly applicable ideas for leveraging your strengths and overcoming your weaknesses.”
—Adam Grant, author of Think Again and Originals, and host of the TED podcast WorkLife

For many of us, listening is simply something we do on autopilot. We hear just enough of what others say to get our work done, maintain friendships, and be polite with our neighbors. But we miss crucial opportunities to go deeper—to give and receive honest feedback, to make connections that will endure for the long haul, and to discover who people truly are at their core.

Fortunately, listening can be improved—and Ximena Vengoechea can show you how. In Listen Like You Mean It, she offers an essential listening guide for our times, revealing tried-and-true strategies honed in her own research sessions and drawn from interviews with marriage counselors, podcast hosts, life coaches, journalists, filmmakers, and other listening experts. Through Vengoechea’s set of scripts, key questions, exercises, and illustrations, you’ll learn to:

• Quickly build rapport with strangers
• Ask the right questions to deepen a conversation
• Pause at the right time to encourage vulnerability
• Navigate a conversation that’s gone off the rails

Now more than ever, we need to feel heard, connected, and understood in a world that keeps turning up the volume. Warm, funny, and immensely practical, this book shows you how.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ximena Vengoechea is a user researcher, writer, and illustrator whose work on personal and professional development has been published in Inc., The Washington Post, Newsweek, Fast Company, and on The Muse. An experienced manager, she previously workedat Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter. She currently lives in San Francisco with her family. Find out more at ximenavengoechea.com.

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Introduction
To Listen Is to Understand

Charlotte was quiet, and so was I. We were sitting in the research lab, in front of a one-way mirror through which my team was observing the session. We had reached a crucial point in our conversation about a difficult and often- taboo topic: personal finances.

It’s often easier to talk about pictures than to talk about something so intimate, so for this study on budgeting, I had asked participants to collect images of their ideal financial future to help guide our discussions. Each participant had a different vision for themselves. Some brought in pictures of luxury cars and extravagant homes to represent a future with more money than they needed, while others, like Charlotte, shared images that showed they aimed for that middle-class dream of home ownership and organic groceries. Still others brought images that indicated they longed for the bare necessities, like getting out of debt and out of the canned food aisle.

From my conversation with Charlotte so far, I knew that she was tired. She had quit a job she loved after having a baby to raise her son full time. Now, she filled her days with childcare and household planning while her husband worked. With a single salary and a third mouth to feed, her family budget had to be measured carefully. Every week she compared deals across local grocery stores, shopped creatively to keep her budget in check, and meal planned according to what was on sale. Every grocery run was carefully documented for her husband, who regularly reviewed their spending in an effort to keep their budget on track.

Some people enjoy the conquest of finding the best deals and will share these stories with pride and a glow in their eyes, but not Charlotte. She dutifully shared the necessary details with me, but I could tell she was not enjoying our conversation. She had increasingly begun to avoid eye contact, and her responses, once clear, were now little more than a mumble. My co‑workers in the back room pinged me on Slack, “Can you ask her to speak up? Hard to hear back here.”

When I asked Charlotte what she thought it would take to get to her ideal financial state—shopping for fancy cheese at gourmet markets instead of the sales at Safeway—she gave me what I knew was a surface-level answer, the kind you give to quickly placate someone without actually saying what you mean. Just like saying “fine” when someone asks you how you’re doing, when you’re actually having the worst day ever.

“More budgeting, I guess,” she said. Then, she was silent, even a bit sullen. She sighed and looked away.

Sensing her unease, I wanted to let Charlotte off the hook and move on to the next topic. Part of me even wanted to bail her out entirely and say, “We’re all done here. Have a great day!” I wanted to interrupt wherever her train of thought was going— because it looked like it was a very stressful place. But I knew that if I did, I’d lose my chance to hear what she needed to say. So instead of moving on, I waited. Five seconds turned into ten seconds, and ten seconds turned into twenty. The silence felt interminable. I focused on my breathing, in and out, in and out, and waited some more. She turned to look at me, and I softly, quietly, held eye contact. And just when things began to feel really awkward, Charlotte spoke.

“I guess I don’t know how we’ll get there,” she said. “We want to buy a home, but it’s hard enough deal- hunting for groceries. Anything beyond that feels impossible—I’m not sure more budgeting can change that.”

Charlotte stopped, but I sensed she had more to say, so I summarized aloud what I had heard.

“It sounds like a difficult balance, to manage both your near- term needs and future dreams,” I said.

“You have no idea,” she said, and she proceeded to open up about her fears and frustrations.

A Researcher’s Tool Kit
For the past seven years, I have refined my listening skills as a user researcher, manager, and mentor at some of Silicon Valley’s top tech companies. My job is to understand the people who use or could someday use the various products we build, from mobile apps and websites to in‑home devices and on‑the‑go experiences. With every conversation, I am required to quickly connect with strangers—sometimes on topics they don’t want to talk about, and often in front of an audience—and discover what makes them tick, what drives them nuts, and how and why our products play a role in their lives. It’s a challenging task, but a good researcher makes it feel natural and easy.

I’ve been a user researcher for nearly a decade now, but no matter how many sessions I’ve run, every interview has a moment like Charlotte’s: a participant is on the verge of sharing something important, until their emotions, temperament, focus, or even a desire to please get in the way, causing them to shut down and clam up. When this happens, every ounce of my body wants to pivot, interrupt, or save participants (and myself) from discomfort.

But I’ve got a job to do. In every study, I have to uncover a specific set of insights that will ensure that my team is building a product that’s actually useful—not just one they assume has potential. I have to know what a participant really thinks, whether by shadowing someone catching a rideshare to learn about their experience with a mobile app (Do they obsessively track their driver’s progress, or do they tuck away their phone and wait it out—and why?), asking a traveler how it feels when a vacation rental listing doesn’t line up with reality to help better set expectations in the future (How inaccurate is too inaccurate? What is considered to be misleading and what’s a simple mistake?), or even prompting a group of participants to critique our app, site, or real- world experience to understand how we can improve it (We know the app could be better—do they think so, too? If so, where should we start?).

So I’ve learned to get comfortable with discomfort. I’ve learned how to lean into it and show the other person that I am interested in what they have to say, and how to confirm my understanding of what I’m hearing in the moment. I’ve learned that to truly connect and understand my participant, I need to stay active in conversation—not by rushing things along or persuading others to come around to my point of view, but by listening thoughtfully to what’s being said, what’s left unsaid, and even what my own inner monologue is saying. Showing up—without engagement, attention, and encouragement—is not enough.

I became a researcher because I am naturally drawn to other people’s stories. The skills I’ve acquired have enabled me to make the space for Charlotte, and countless other participants, to be vulnerable and honest with me, a perfect stranger, about their true feelings on a variety of topics. But what I didn’t know when I first started is that the skills I was learning as a researcher would serve me not just in the lab but outside of it, too. Being patient, asking open- ended questions, facilitating a conversation—these techniques help me get to the bottom of a research question, but they also help me build better relationships with my colleagues, direct reports, family, and loved ones.

Most of us listen well enough, but without deliberate attention we may move through conversation with significant blind spots. It’s easy for us to learn only part of the story, or misunderstand it entirely. Miscommunication can escalate a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Portfolio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593087054
• ISBN 13: 9780593087053
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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