How to listen, with Dr Simon Moore

Thanks for listening to this episode of our Future-proof Your Career. After each episode I’ll be collecting my notes from our guest here.

In this episode we spoke to Dr Simon Moore. Simon is a doctor of Psychophysiological Psychology and a Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society. He leads a team of researchers at IB, a business he founded to help brands to better understand their customers and employees.

Here are my key takeaways from the conversation:

What are you listening for?

Simon highlighted that we often go into a conversation or interview situation with a bias. We’re not neutral as listeners, we often want something from the conversation. Be aware of this. Consider your biases and your own objectives and try to see the conversation through that lens.

There are different modes of listening

Sometimes you might be listening in an informational mode, looking to fill in the blanks on your mental questionnaire. Sometimes your mode might be more empathetic, where you’re trying to extract or understand the emotional context behind the words

Think about which mode you’re in when you’re going into a conversation. Which one should you be in? What information are you missing by being in one mode or the other?

What’s behind the words?

Though we have to respect what people say, it’s worth sometimes being a little sceptical and questioning the drivers behind those words. Look for signals beyond the vocal for what’s really going on: gestures, behaviour, visual cues from both the person and their surroundings. What can you take from the objects and pictures with which they surround themselves?

Who are you listening to?

Simon talked to us about four different categories of people - categories that help us to understand their desires and their behaviours. Planners, adventurers, sociables and individualists. These categories are laid out in more detail in this interview with Simon that is well worth a read: https://insidebe.com/articles/interview-with-simon-moore/

Shut up and count to ten

We talked about a variety of techniques for listening, not least enforcing a little silence - especially on yourself, if you’re prone to fill in every gap in the conversation. Give people room to speak and expand by making yourself count to ten in your head before you speak.

Make a movie

If you really want to understand someone, try Simon’s technique of making a movie in your head of what they’re saying. It’s comparable to how writing things down can help you to learn them. But making a mental movie of someone’s story won’t just help you to understand the details, it will help you to empathise with their situation - putting yourself in their shoes.