What would a conversation look like with zero questions? This is a bit of an odd question that crossed my desk. But I have a really fun answer that has transformed the way that I dive in and engage in conversation with people both in personal life and also with my wife and also in work relationships in a work context.

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It’s really interesting. Not that I recommend diving into a conversation and asking no  questions at all. In fact, me and Will wrote  a book about How To Ask Questions in order to create conversations that really matter. And yet, if you completely remove questions from your conversational vocabulary, in this video, I’m going to share 4 levels of listening that create the opportunity to have a really fantastic conversation even though you haven’t asked necessarily. If you stick around the video, I’m also going to share 15 phrases that are really, really phenomenal phrases that create better conversation, better listening.

These are phrases that can be perfectly fitted to  whatever context and content of the conversation that you’re in. They’re really, really useful as reflective listening phrases. In a world where you couldn’t ask any questions or for some reason you just were aware of how many questions you were asking, it started to feel a bit like an interrogation. These 15 phrases are really, really useful to pull out of your back pocket to ensure that somebody feels heard and the conversation continues forward with a little bit of momentum.

When I’m watching a video, I love to know kind of the path of where we’re going before we get strung along too much. The 4 levels of listening are verbatim, translation, unstated feelings, and connecting the dots. Let’s take each one of those and expand them a little bit. At the end of this video, you will 100% be a better listener. If for some reason, you feel cheated by this video and you don’t feel like a better listener and a better conversationalist, at the end of this video, you can write me an angry email. Find my email somewhere and me and will will send you a free copy of Ask Powerful Questions Create Conversations That Matter.  

Verbatim Reflection

First of all, all 4 of these levels of listening are really levels of reflective listening. Reflective listening is the idea that if I were to hold up a mirror to your words or whatever you’re saying to me, “I’m just going to hold up and reflect them back to you.” Now, there’s lots of ways that you can reflect. If you’ve ever been into a fun house at a circus or something, there’s the mirror that’s kind of curved that makes you look really long, there’s one that makes you look really wide. Then there’s just a normal mirror. Point is you can reflect in lots of different ways. First way is verbatim reflection. The first way is verbatim reflection. Do you see what I just did there? Just literally repeated exactly what I just said verbatim. Word for word. That is the idea of verbatim reflection. Now, this sounds ridiculous and when I first learned it, it felt ridiculous to do. But I was shocked. I still am shocked that when I verbatim reflect what I heard somebody else say how frequently, they either say, “Oh, that’s exactly what I mean.” Or they’re like, “No, no, no, no, no.” This is what I meant and then they actually clarify. It’s phenomenal. Like, literally just feeding somebody’s words back. I think it’s partially because we’re in our own heads. As we’re speaking, we don’t hear  exactly what we sound like when we’re speaking necessarily. That verbatim reflection is a really easy way to reflect back. Keep a conversation going forward. Now, I will say verbatim reflection is probably most likely to end a conversation if the person’s like, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I got.” So, if your goal is to have a conversation with by asking no questions, that might be a tough one.

Translation

That is where I take most of your words edit them a little bit and then repeat them back. I might take your language and put it into my language. There are 2 types of translation. You can do a simple translation and a far out translation.

Simple translation

Just making some slight tweaks so that it doesn’t sound like I just parroted back exactly what you said.

Far out translation

This is where I’m using my own words as the listener and expanding on meaning.  

If I ask you, “How was your day?” And you tell me, “It was really good. I had a big win at work. And family life is good”, I could say simple translation. Wow, it sounds like you had a really good day at work and things are going really smoothly with your family. Just a simple translation. Nothing too crazy. Now, if you said that same thing a far out translation, might look like, “Wow, it sounds like your life as a whole is going really, really well.” Do you see how that was my own words. I even expanded on the meaning of what you just said in that moment. The power of a far out translation is when you expand that meaning, you often invite a really thoughtful response from the other person. Either clarifying or expanding on what you’ve just said. Because you’ve taken some liberties and gone extended the conversation, extended what they said a little bit further than what they actually said. Harder to do but extremely powerful if done well.

Reflecting Unstated Feelings

The third level of reflective listening is reflecting back unstated feelings and this is a really useful one that is extremely underutilized. What I mean by that is when we speak, words come out of our mouth. Most of the time, depending on who it is, most of the time they’re not necessarily filled with emotional words. They’re not… You know, people don’t necessarily say, “I’m really sad right now or I’m really angry right now.” Sometimes we do. But more often than not, we’re describing something that’s really making us really frustrated. But we don’t say, “I’m angry.” Just we see that frustration. Reflecting back unstated feelings would be something along the lines of just looking back at them and observing, “Hey, I can see that you’re really frustrated right now”. In fact, my wife and I are reading this parenting book together.  There was a comic in it that showed a kid who bumped his head and was crying screaming really reacting. There was 2 types of parents. One was and is the most common thing that we do with people’s feelings is deny and dismiss them. You see, somebody’s feeling really sad. You’re like, “No, no. It’s okay. It’ll be good. Like this is only temporary.” Blah, blah,blah. You kind of dismiss and deny. But the idea here was to unpack a little bit further to talk with the kid, to get them to share and unpack why it is that they’re sad and to acknowledge to get them to realize that sometimes they’re not sad. Because especially when a kid is really, really sad, that is all they can think about. They’re so absorbed in that world. Whereas if you’re able to pull out and you have some unstated feelings reflected back at you, it gives you some more awareness and some more choice over your emotions which is an extremely powerful gift to give to somebody.

Connecting The Dots

The fourth level of reflective listening is really, really cool, connecting the dots. This is where you get to take people and connect them to ideas and connect people to people and ideas to ideas in the way that you actually listen and feedback. 

I used to work for an organization called World And Conversation and my job was to sit down with a group of strangers and talk about really soft fluffy topics like race, relations, long-term conflict, politics, religion, etc with no agenda other than to understand the other. One of the neatest things that would happen in those conversations maybe about 60 minutes into the conversation is there would be so much conversational data, so much story, so much experience out on the table that people were sharing that there were just so many dots that could be connected in that conversation. In fact, I was in one conversation a dialogue with a kid who was black grew up going to a 98% black school in New York city and a kid who grew up in rural North Carolina where I may not have seen somebody who was black especially at school. Now, they’re sitting in the same room in a conversation with being facilitated by me about race relations. At the end of the conversation, they looked at each other and said, “Dude, you are just like me.” It was such a powerful moment because and what sparked that was they actually connected the dots themselves. I can’t take any credit for that aha or that bridge building. What essentially brought that up was at one point, somebody was sharing that their parents told them when they went out of the house to watch  out for white people and to be mindful of the way  you were acting around white people. Somebody else’s parents said, when you walk into the house, be mindful of how you interact around or with people who are black.

In that conversation, they saw and they actually they saw these dots being connected. They actually looked at each other and said, “Dude, you’re just like me.” And that’s the power of really great connecting the dot type of listening, is as the facilitator or as a leader or as an educator, to be able to connect what somebody’s talking about now with what they did talk about the in the past or what somebody else talked about in the past or to connect 2 people in the present. Just having the language of thinking about listening to connect the dots will make you a really, really fun conversationalist to be around. 

Now that you’ve got 4 levels of reflective listening. It’s helpful to have phrases that mix up the way that reflective listening sounds. Because you don’t want to sound like Dr. Phil that just says,”I hear you saying. I hear you saying. I hear you saying.” Right? Repeat back. Because when you’re reflective listening too much you can start to sound like a therapist or a counselor which likely if you’re watching this video is not your goal  or your aim.