Great post! I really strongly agree with this advice, and I think it’s one of the most important ways my communication skills have improved over time.
I especially really liked your point about cargo cult science—that active listening often seems trite because people are just repeating thing, without the underlying mental effort. That felt like it helped clarify some disagreements I’d had with people about this approach before, I think I took the underlying mental effort as implicit, and they didn’t.
My current favourite way of explaining it, is that the default state of the world is that you’ve misunderstood, because good communication is hard. You should reflect things back, ask “was that a correct summary?”, have the other person point out what’s wrong, try again, and keep iterating until they’re happy
Great post! I really strongly agree with this advice, and I think it’s one of the most important ways my communication skills have improved over time.
I especially really liked your point about cargo cult science—that active listening often seems trite because people are just repeating thing, without the underlying mental effort. That felt like it helped clarify some disagreements I’d had with people about this approach before, I think I took the underlying mental effort as implicit, and they didn’t.
My current favourite way of explaining it, is that the default state of the world is that you’ve misunderstood, because good communication is hard. You should reflect things back, ask “was that a correct summary?”, have the other person point out what’s wrong, try again, and keep iterating until they’re happy