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REFLECTIVE MOTIVATIONAL STRATEGIES

First of all, it's necessary to remember that the four skills I'm going to describe are learned skills, not innate human capabilities, and that anybody can learn them. We often hear two objections when we describe these skills to our clients. One is that Reflective Listening may be all right for some people, but "I'm just not a good natural listener" (or, "I'm too shy," "I'm not much of a conversationalist"). In other words, I'm not capable of learning how to listen any differently than I do now.

Not true. Nobody was born knowing how to talk; everybody learned that critical communicational skill, slowly, bit by bit, until it was mastered. It's the same thing with Listening. With practice, anybody can learn Reflective Listening. And it takes a lot less time to learn than it took any of us to learn to talk.

The second objection we hear is that these listening skills are "unnatural." Some clients say that they feel forced and uncomfortable when they first start practicing Reflective Listening - and that they are wary of the new skills because they don't want to appear insincere or phony.

This is not an unreasonable fear, but I can assure you that, as with any other newly acquired skills, the Reflective Listening skills become far less "unnatural" with practice, and at the same time more effective. In our experience, it takes very little time, especially in team workshop settings, for participants to become comfortable with the four skills I'm about to describe.  And ultimately the proof is in the pudding: In the words of an East Coast plant manager who expressed misgivings when we first taught him Reflective Listening, "I've been using this stuff for two months now, and it's getting easier all the time. Considering how our performance has gone up as a result, I don't see how I ever got along without it."

That is a comment, we've found, that is frequently echoed by our client managers. The reason is that Reflective Listening provides two enormous benefits to anybody whose job involves getting other people turned on to their jobs.

First, it helps to clarify the situation by enhancing the flow of information that anybody needs to get his job done in the first place. Reflective Listening techniques supplement the Pinpointing and Recording and Evaluation elements of our system by ensuring that both people involved in a communication process are starting with the same basic data.

Second, Reflective Listening helps to validate - and therefore reinforce - the person to whom you're speaking. It ties in with the Involvement and Consequences elements of the P.R.I.C.E. system, by letting the other person know that you have been attending to what he's been saying, and that you want to hear more. Whatever the specific content of your Reflective Listening response, the very fact that you give feedback to the other person about his or her comments becomes in itself a motivating factor.

Next week we will start discussion of the four skills required for Reflecting Listening:
1. Prompting
2. Open-ended questions
3. Rephrasing
4. Empathy statements

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