Listening

So, what is active listening? For me, it’s putting in practice the fact that we’ve got one mouth and two ears. That means we should listen twice as long as we speak. So active listening, for me, is taking the time to make sure that we have understood precisely the message of the other person. And this message is the spoken, but also the unspoken. What is the body language saying? What’s the attitude saying? What are the hands saying? Do I really get, you know, what the other person wants to transmit in these communications? So I am able to use that information and act in a proper way, in answer.

It’s very important to listen in life, but especially as a leader, since you’re taking a lot of decisions. And very often decisions are biased by guilt, by doubt or by fear. Unless you are sure that there is no underlying motivation for people to express what they express, you seriously risk [taking] to take the wrong decision. Imagine someone who is explaining the case, but actually, they fear that they might have to implement what they recommend to be doing, and they’re not feeling comfortable about it. They might refrain from giving you all the elements around the story, or maybe they’ve done a mistake before and they don’t want that mistake to be unleashed and they’ve got guilt around it. So, how do you put yourself in a situation where you really understand all the underlying aspects of the situation so that you can [make]take the best decision? This is why it’s really important to actively listen, to get all that information.