 Today, you're going to learn a hack that's going to improve your communication skills massively. It's really easy to implement, really easy to learn, but most people don't know how to do it. And in my role of training thousands and thousands of facilitators over the last few years, this has been one of the key aspects of improving their facilitation skills by improving this one aspect of communication. And it's called active listening. What you're about to see is a video from our course called Facilitation Fundamentals. This is the workbook from it. And we're going to be showing you inside one piece of one lesson from that program. We're going to be looking at verbal active listening. I don't want to waste any more of your time. We're going to jump right into it, but really quick, if you're interested in facilitation, if you're interested in this entire topic, we've got a free community called the Facilitator Club. You can join it for free. No strings attached. Join hundreds of other facilitators from around the world, learning facilitation together, getting free lessons from us. Right below this video, you'll find a link to facilitatorclub.com. That's it. Go check that out. And now let's go to the video. Technique number two, be an active listener. Now, a lot of you are probably watching this video and going, listening, all I have to do is just look at someone. And when they talk, it just goes in and I'm listening. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's just listening. That's passive listening. There's a huge, huge difference between active and passive listening. Listening is just hearing what somebody is saying. But have you ever been at a party or have you ever just met someone? They've asked you a question. They say, Hey, how are you doing? And you start telling them how you're doing. And somehow you can tell they don't really care about the answer. They're just like, Okay, yeah, okay. And as soon as you finish talking, they just tell you something that you've triggered in their mind. So you tell them, Oh yeah, I'm doing okay. You know, I'm thinking of moving to Thailand and they're like, Thailand, right? I read a new story about Thailand. And after a while, you start feeling very tired and not interested in talking to this person. It's because this person's not actually listening to you. They're just trying to get you to trigger things in their minds. They're not listening. They're thinking about the next thing to say to you. This is okay in conversation, I suppose. And we're not trying to do a conversation improvement course here. But as a facilitator, it's absolutely not okay. As a facilitator, you're actually going to be using an extremely powerful skill, which requires conscious effort called active listening to bring people through a workshop. Let me read a definition for you because I did not invent this myself. And I think it's really important to give credit to the boys who came up with it in 1957. The boys being Carl Rogers, who we will be mentioning a lot in this program. And if you see the workbook, you're going to see Carl Rogers, that Carl Rogers life is represented in there. So Carl Rogers and Richard Farson coined the term active listening in 1957 before my time in a paper of the same title. Rogers and Farson write active listening is an important way to bring about changes in people. Despite the popular notion that listening is a passive approach, it isn't. Clinical and research evidence clearly shows that sensitive listening is a most effective agent for individual personality change and group development groups. It's the group thing that we're doing in this group. Listening brings about changes in people's attitudes towards themselves and others. It also brings about changes in their basic values and personal philosophy. People who've been listened to in this new and special way become more emotionally mature. Why didn't anyone listen to me as a child? More open to their experiences, less defensive. This is just describing all of my problems. More democratic and less authoritarian. That's good. That's good. You should listen to people. If you just listen to people, they would be better people in this world and bad things would not happen. And that's what we're training you to do. You're going to make bad things not happen in this world. If we can train eight billion facilitators with this course, then the world will be an amazing place. Have I gotten lost? Are we done here? Okay. Let's get back to active listening. There are two main types of active listening. Verbal and non-verbal. You probably guessed that one, non-verbal. So let's take a look at the verbal side of active listening. The idea here is that you're using your voice to reflect what the person is saying to you and to also confirm that you understand what they are saying. And there are five ways of doing this. Number one, paraphrasing. Paraphrasing is basically repeating or re-wording what somebody has said to you back to them the way you understood it. This very simply shows to the person who you're talking to that you've listened to and understood what they've said. And how you can actually say this back is, okay, so I think I'm hearing and then say it in your own words. Or I think what you're trying to say is, and then finish that with, is that accurate? This really, really clarifies to the person you're listening to that you have listened. Because if you're paraphrasing what they've said in your own words, the way you've understood it, then clearly you've heard what they've said and you've internalized it. This also allows them to correct you if you've misunderstood what they said. And it's a very, very simple way to get clarity in a conversation. You've heard what they said and they understand that you've heard what they said and understood what they said. So paraphrasing is a super powerful and super simple tool. I would also recommend using this in normal conversations with people instead of coming up with a response instead of just saying, oh yeah, this reminds me of this and this and this. You say, well, so while you're trying to say is that this, this and this and this, is that what you mean? That immediately gives the person the feeling you're listening to them. So paraphrasing is the first thing you can do when you're doing verbal active listening. Number two, mirroring. As an Irish person, this is very hard to say, but it will be written on screen. So you know what I said mirroring. So what if you paraphrase something to a participant in a workshop and they still feel frustrated and they still feel like you're not listening to them? Well, what you can do and don't use this very often, only use it if paraphrasing doesn't work. What you can do is actually literally repeat exactly what they said back to them. So if they said to you, I don't think the solution is going to work because the team hasn't got enough time to develop it. Then I would say, okay, you don't think the solution is going to work because the team doesn't have time to develop it. Literally the exact same thing back to them, just to confirm I've heard exactly what they said. And some people actually, I'm a little bit like this. I'm quite pedantic. I do need someone to mirror what I've said before I believe that they've actually heard me. So that's number two, mirroring. Number three, questioning. What happens if you're talking to someone and you're you're trying to do your active listening, but they're just not talking a lot back to you? Well, one thing you can do is questioning. You can help draw out the information from them so that you actually have more information from them that they feel like they're able to say things that you're listening to. Well, what you can do is just help them along by asking some simple questions. So if someone says something to you, but you don't feel like they've said enough, you can say, can you tell me more about that? Interesting. Can you go further? Or can you go deeper into that topic? Or you could say, what's another way of putting that? Just really looking for ways to help that person to speak more. And then once they've said what you consider to be everything for that topic, you can then paraphrase it back to them or mirror it back to them, just to clarify that you've really heard it and understood it. So that's number three and that's questioning. We're going to be going more into questioning and one of the further techniques in this section. But for active listening, it's really just about saying something like, okay, can you tell me a little bit more about that? Or can you talk a little bit more about that? Okay, interesting. Is there anything more you can say about that? Just really helping move them along if they're reluctant to speak. Because remember as a facilitator, you do need this information from the group so that the entire group can move forward. Number four, and this is a big one and most facilitators will never do this. It's called reflecting feelings. So when you're speaking to somebody, another really great way to show that you're deeply listening. And it's also a great way to show empathy that you really understand what they're feeling is by reflecting their feelings back to them. Things like saying, it seems like you're really worried about this. Or hearing what you've just said, it seems like there's a lot of anxiety around the development date. Or it sounds like this is something that's been frustrating you for a while. It seems like you're frustrated. This is just a very simple way to show them that you understand how they feel. So they're not going to be frustratedly trying to get things across in different words if you can really quickly show them that you understand the feelings that they have. It's going to help them feel seen and also help them move on in the workshop more easily. The fifth and final step in verbal active listening is to summarize. Now, this is not to be confused by paraphrasing. Paraphrasing is when you're repeating things back in your own words during a conversation just to make sure that the other person knows that you've understood them and also to make sure that you really have understood them. Summarizing is at the end of a conversation. It's a way to really close the door completely on the conversation for the whole group or for the individual you're working with. And the idea here is that you're saying, so here's what I've understood. The so is important. This is really the sort of finishing things up word. So here's what I've understood. This, this, this and this. Now, obviously later we're going to be talking about like writing these things down, but generally the fifth and final step of verbal active listening is really just summarizing the conversation that has happened. So everyone feels like, okay, the facilitator has understood, has spoken this understanding in a summary back to the group. Now everyone in the group understands so we can close the door and move on. Moving on is the key here. As a facilitator, your job is to keep the entire conversation moving, to keep the workshop moving. But if you can't close the door, people can't move on. So you have to summarize the conversation. So here's what I've understood. Is there anything I'm missing? That's something you can add to the end just to make sure. But that's really the perfect way to finish things up. Summarizing. So those are the steps involved in verbal active listening. Now, let's go to the slightly more difficult to quantify non-verbal. Let's do this. Great stuff. Verbal active listening. So I hope you enjoyed that video and I hope it gave you a good overview of verbal active listening. If you want to learn more about facilitation for free and join the world's best facilitation community, go to facilitatorclub.com or click the link down in the description. And I hope you liked this video. If you did, give it a like because it shows the video to more people on YouTube. Thank you so much. See you later.