How to upgrade your listening skills!

How using Compassionate Communication skills has upped my game when it comes to listening.

Whenever I share information about Compassionate Communication (CC), I always start by acknowledging where I came across the concept. It was during lockdown, and I was at home with two young children, one of whom had just started school and was then at-home learning. I was looking for resources to “up my game” when it came to parenting, and I came across a book by Eloise Rickman that introduced me to the concept of Nonviolent Communication (NVC). The founder was Marshall Rosenberg, PhD, and his ideas certainly piqued my interest. Here I am, almost 6 years later, sharing how learning about NVC has been pivotal for me “upping my game” in all areas of my life, be that with my children, socially, and most impactfully, my work-life, through the use of compassionate communication, for myself and others.

I am a veterinary nurse and work at VetLed as a training coordinator and trainer. My absolute passion is communication. Veterinary human factors had been the missing link in my work life, and I feel proud to be part of a team that delivers veterinary CPD, which is impactful for all members of veterinary teams and has veterinary patient safety at its core.

In this blog, I will share how using compassionate communication when we are listening to one another can really be a game-changer in our interactions.

Imagine this; you have woken up on a Monday morning and you go about your day to day tasks to get ready for work but everything seems to have gone wrong – you are out of coffee and can’t make your usual wake up drink, you forgot you needed more fuel in your car, and it puts you behind, and on your journey into work you get stuck behind a tractor for the majority of the commute. By the time you arrive at work, you are feeling stressed and cannot wait to let someone know just how difficult your morning has been! You spot a colleague who often has a sympathetic ear, and you offload your story to them. You finish, then pause, and the response you get is...

“Have you thought about waking up earlier?”

How do you think you would feel? Frustrated? Annoyed? Grateful?

I think many of us in this scenario would want to be heard and would love the other person to show that they did hear us. How about if they had responded...

“It sounds like you had a rough morning, where nothing seemed to go right! How about I make you a coffee?”

How would you feel this time? I imagine that I would feel thankful that someone had heard what I had to say, even if I still held on to some frustration from the difficult morning.

Why does one response sit differently from another? In each situation, the person did hear the information shared, but it was the response that differed.

I have attended many hours of NVC training, and one exercise that stands out for me is the one on ‘Habitual ways of listening’. On hearing the exercise, I thought – I've always been a great listener, I doubt I will learn a lot in this part. But how wrong I was!

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Our trainer explained how there are so many ways that we “listen”. Ironically, all are ways we respond with words, aka not listening! Do any of these ways of responding resonate with you?

• Commiserating - “Oh my, that does sound awful!!”
• Cheerleading - “Don’t worry, you’ve got this!”
• Fact-finding - “So, tell me what exactly they said?!”
• Storytelling - “You know what, that reminds me of the time where...”
• One-upping - “Well, if you think that was tough...”

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All the responses above are ways that we disconnect from the person sharing the information. Yet haven’t we all done it? It is the norm for our society, especially for those of us with a scientific background – we want to fix! We want certainty, and we often want to avoid those uncomfortable feelings. The downside of using the above is that it rarely helps the other person. We have a need to be heard, to have a voice, and disconnecting conversations can leave us feeling unsatisfied (at best!). I identified that I was often a ‘fixer’ (the first example, where the person says to get up earlier!). This insight led me to look for ways to flex my empathy muscles, with intention.

Using NVC principles to bring compassion into our lives and workplaces means being open to conversation and really hearing the other person. I believe that empathy is a superpower, be it innate or intentional, and that if we can create ways to connect with one another with authenticity, this kindness ripples out throughout our day, benefitting everyone, be they furry, scaled, or human beings.

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