Book of the Month - October 2023
Listen Like You Mean It
Ximena Vengoechea - ISBN: 978-0593087053 - 2021
Author:
Ximena Vengoechea
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 The Muse. An experienced manager, she previously worked at Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter. She currently lives in San Francisco with her family. Find out more at ximenavengoechea.com.
Brief Synopsis:
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.
Insights:
“There is no quicker way to end a conversation—or a relationship—than to appear distracted.” (p. 32)
“Attempting to finish other people’s sentences may be our way of bidding for attention, but it rarely gets us there.” (p. 57)
“If you can train yourself to stay silent for a hair longer than is comfortable, it’s likely your conversation partner will jump in to fill the void. When they do jump in, it’ll be worth the wait.” (p. 149)
Should I read it or skip it?
Recently, I met with a coach who said to me, “You give too much context and not enough clarity.” I took his point. Too much story people do not care about creates listeners who don’t hear everything you say. While this book is primarly about listening, learning to listen well makes communication better. Alan encouraged me to ask more questions to understand the information that needs to be transmitted. This clarification means you can laser focus instead of trying a shotgun approach when it comes to information. For that reason, I think we all need this book. I will warn you I feel in attempt to keep the book at a certain length, several of the end chapters should have been separated into multiple chapters.
