Listening

“Active listening” and “reflecting” are terms commonly used in the helping professions such as counseling and therapy. Counselors recognize that communications are frequently loaded with multiple meanings and that the counselor must try to identify these different. meanings without making the communicator angry or defensive. There are three major forms of listening:

1. Passive listening involves receiving the message while providing no feedback to the sender about the accuracy or completeness of reception. Sometimes passive listening is itself enough to keep a communicator sending information. A negotiator whose counterpart is talkative may find that the best strategy is to sit and listen while the other party eventually works into, or out of, a position on his or her own.

2. Acknowledgment is the second form of listening, slightly more active than passive listening. When acknowledging, receivers occasionally nod their heads, maintain eye contact, or interject responses like “I see”, “mm-hmm”, “interesting”, “really”, “sure”, “go on”, and the like. These responses are sufficient to keep communicators sending messages, but a sender may misinterpret them as the receiver’s agreement with his or her position, rather than as simple acknowledgments of receipt of the message. Active listening is the third form. When receivers are actively listening, they restate or paraphrase the sender’s message in their own language. Here are a few examples of active listening:

Sender: I don’t know how I am going to untangle this messy problem.

Receiver: You’re really stumped on how to solve this one.

Sender: Please, don’t ask me about that now.

Receiver: Sounds like you’re awfully busy right now.

Sender: I thought the meeting today accomplished nothing.

Receiver: You were very disappointed with our session.

Active listening is a hallmark of communication in counseling settings, but its value in negotiation might seem less obvious because, in negotiation, the listener normally has a set position and may feel strongly about the issues. By recommending active listening, we are not suggesting that receivers should automatically agree with the other party’s position and abandon their own. Rather, we regard active listening as a skill that encourages others to speak more fully about their feelings, priorities, frames of reference, and, by extension, the positions they are taking. When the other party does so, negotiators will better understand the other’s positions; the factors and information that support it; and the ways the position can be compromised, reconciled, or negotiated in accordance with their own preferences and priorities.