How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

EXTREME LISTENING
In 
Chapter 8
, I showed how you can strengthen rapport with others by asking
high-quality questions and truly listening to the answers. But there’s another
type of listening that can also serve you well in your relationships at work, since
it’s a great tool for helping other people think clearly and take initiative.
It involves us redefining what it means to be helpful when some one mentions
that they have something on their mind. For most of us, the highest form of
helpfulness is to step in and offer suggestions. But when someone is telling us
about a problem and we leap in to offer advice, a paradox arises: it’s all too easy

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to leave the other person feeling bombarded rather than soothed. “Have you
done this? What about that?” we say. Inadvertently, we can even make the other
person feel judged, as if they should have spotted the answer themselves. If that
happens, their brain is likely to register our well-intentioned help as a kind of
threat—which makes them less creative in their own thinking about the problem.
By the end of the discussion, instead of saying, “Wow, I feel motivated and
empowered now,” they’re mumbling, “Well, I guess I’ll go and do all those
things, then.”
So what’s the alternative? Instead of racking your brain to come up with
solutions and ideas, you create the best possible space for 
the other person
to
think effectively about the problem. The approach is called “extreme listening,”
a term coined by educationalist Nancy Kline.
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It works by doing two things: it
boosts the other person’s feelings of autonomy and competence, which helps to
keep their brain in discovery mode; and it encourages them to step back and
reflect. As we’ve seen earlier in the book, both discovery mode and reflection
time create a fine foundation for good thinking and high performance.
Here’s how to do some extreme listening: