 Yeah, for those of you who weren't here on Sunday, my name is Ben Bose. I usually go by Bose, and I'm a product design manager at Pivotal Labs Singapore, and Pivotal Labs we're trying to transform the way the world builds software. If you want to know more about that, it's probably a different talk, but feel free to check me out online or go ahead and check out Pivotal. There's some of the links there. So as you all probably know, one of the key themes for UXSEA this year is the balance between humankind and emerging technologies, things like artificial intelligence, robots, automation, lots of chatbot discussions. So depending on who you talk to and what you read, the future may look something like this, where artificial intelligence and robots take all of our jobs and eventually wipe us off the place of the planet. Or if you're more optimistic, the future might look more like this horrible stock photo, where artificial intelligence and robots not only make us better our jobs, but they also maybe make us better humans, because after they take up all the repetitive tasks, we're going to have to double down on the things that make us more human. We're going to have to double down on our humanity. We'll need to start focusing on our soft skills, things like communication, emotional intelligence, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and empathy, a lot of things that we've heard and some of the conversations that we've had over the last day or two. And the soft skill that I want to talk about today that I think is arguably maybe one of the most important ones, especially for UX designers, is listening. The only problem that we run into as human beings in today's society is that we suck at listening. We're terrible listeners. I should mention that I'm not here today talking about listening because I think of myself as a master listener. Just like most people, I sometimes suck at listening. In fact, the reason that I started digging into this topic at all is because I have this incredibly caring and passionate partner. And just like most couples from time to time, we fight and we argue. And during one of our arguments a while back, things were getting pretty heated. And she yelled at me and she goes, you never listen. And at that moment, all I could think of my head was, I never listen. That's ridiculous. I'm a UX designer. My job all day long is literally listening to people complain about the things that I make. What do you mean I don't listen? And as I was thinking that thought, I could hear her voice getting louder and her face, I could see it getting redder. I could see the veins in her neck starting to bulge out as she's yelling at me. And it dawned on me that in that moment, I, in fact, was not listening. I had already started thinking about what a great listener I was. And I hadn't heard a thing since the first statement, you never listen. And so that's why I decided to start digging into this topic a little bit because I was like, how could I be so bad at listening? A UX designer, this is crazy. How many people in this room have ever heard their significant other or parents or friends utter this phrase to them? Come on, you can be honest. Well, I'm glad to know I'm not the only one. But the good news is that our inability to listen isn't entirely our own faults. And I'm gonna talk today a little bit about why that is and what are some of the things that we can do to become better listeners. But before I talk about some of that, I want to do a quick exercise together. And it's called 478 Breathing. And in this exercise, we're gonna all breathe through our mouths for four seconds. So, and then we're gonna hold it for seven seconds. And then breathe out for eight, like that, okay? And when you breathe out, try to make a little bit of noise, okay? So just like I did. So what I'll have you do is actually, I'm gonna have everybody in the room kind of close their eyes. We're gonna relax for a minute, keep them closed until I tell you to open them again. We're gonna only go through four breaths, okay? And if you want, you might want to just bow your head a little bit. So when you breathe out, you're not breathing directly on the neck of the person in front of you, okay? So go ahead and close your eyes and I'll guide us through some 478 Breathing, okay? Everybody eyes closed? Bring it down for a second. Okay, ready? Breathe in, two, three, four, hold. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, breathe out. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. And do it one more time. Breathe in, two, three, four, hold. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, breathe out. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Okay, hold on one second, keep your eyes closed. For the next one or two, what I want you to do is think about like stress or something kind of weight that's been on your shoulders. And when we breathe out this time, we're going to sigh it out. So you'll be like, like that. And if it helps, you can stick out your tongue, okay? All right, so on the next one, here we go, right? Breathe in, two, three, four, hold. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, breathe out. Nice, okay, we're going to do one more, right? And when we breathe this one out, make sure to stick your tongue out when you do this one because it really helps. Believe me, it does, okay? So breathe in, two, three, four, hold. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, breathe out. Okay, how do you feel? Maybe a little lightheaded, maybe a little more relaxed. Maybe our heads feel just a little bit clearer, right? And this exercise, four, seven, eight breathing is a super quick and easy exercise that can actually help make us better listeners with like, next to a little effort, right? It took us about like 30 seconds just to do a couple of breaths. It can really help us relax and just kind of check in on ourselves, clear our heads a little bit so that way we're ready to receive the information that's going to be told to us, right? It's something that I like to use sometimes maybe before an important meeting or before a difficult conversation. And that's why I kind of sneakily put it into the beginning of this talk so that maybe you guys would be better listeners, we'll see. All right, so the next thing I want to do is, in your heads, think of three people in your life that you consider to be good listeners. And once you, if you have a pen and paper, you can maybe write those three people down. And so I'll give you a couple of seconds here. Just think of three people in your life that you consider to be good listeners. Got some ideas? Cool. Um, I want you to do is raise your hand if you wrote down or thought of the name of somebody that you don't like. It's not a single person in the room. All right. Raise your hand if you thought of someone that you like. Raise your hand if you thought of somebody that you love. What about somebody that you respect? Awesome. So what does this tell us about listening? Maybe that it's a pretty important skill to have, especially if we want to be liked, loved and respected by the people around us. So I guess it begs the question, why are we so terrible at listening? All right. Oh, sorry, I jumped ahead a little bit. But behind robots and artificial intelligence come to steal your job. There's actually a lot of other good reasons, aside from being liked, loved and respected, why we should improve our listening skills. Right. It's actually an awesome skill that we can improve not only for work, but also in our daily lives. And the beauty of listening is that it literally costs us nothing. Like we don't, it doesn't take a ton of effort, but it can bring us huge benefits. So listening helps build trust and rapport, right? When someone feels genuinely listened to, they're more willing to trust because, and because of that trust, you're going to build a deeper connection with that person. Listening shows that you care and it invites others to open up. Once someone knows that you care, maybe they become a bit more comfortable, they're a little bit more willing to share. And that's especially important when we're out doing user research. Right. I believe it was like Lee Sean yesterday from the research panel said that the most important question in her research is how is your day? And it might be that we're the first person who's generally listening to that person about how their day was. And so we want our participants in our research to feel as comfortable as possible. So they're more willing to give us more information about whatever that topic is that we're researching with them. Listening broadens our own perspective. I think we have to accept the fact that our own perspective in life isn't necessarily the complete truth, or it's not necessarily the way that everyone else sees things. And listening to other people's perspectives allows us to look at life from a different angle. Yesterday, Caitlin and Matt from MoneySpart talked about how they might like swap roles and try to defend someone else's argument in order to see their point of view, right? And I think that's all in an effort to help see that person's perspective. You can't have empathy without listening. And if listening is the heart of empathy and if empathy is the heart of user experience design, this should actually be really important to us as designers because we can't truly understand our users and put ourselves in their place and feel what they feel without listening to them. And it's only when we like shift the focus away from ourselves and really listen to someone else that we start to get a peek at what's really going on in their world and we start to see the deeper meanings and implications of the things behind what they're saying. When you listen to someone, they'll be more willing to listen to you. So it's a really cool thing about listening is that it's actually contagious. It's a good STD. So if you have maybe a boss or a coworker who won't listen to you, you might want to take them out. Go get some coffee or something and use your UX skills to maybe get them to talk a little bit and use these new listening skills to help build some trust and empathy. And at the end, hopefully they'll be a little bit more willing to listen to you. And if these reasons aren't good enough as to why we should work on listening skills, if you ask my grandmother why you should listen, she'll tell you, God gave you two ears and only one mouth for a reason, Benjamin Bose, so you sit down and you be quiet. So you show that about, we spent about 70 to 80% of our waking hours in some form of communication. Of that time, about 9% is writing, 16% is reading, 30% speaking, and 45% is listening. So almost half of our time communicating is spent listening, which makes sense because if you think about your job and how much of your job requires you to listen, it's probably quite a bit. I know I've sat in a lot of meetings where I actually didn't say a single word. But the sad truth is that most of the time that we're supposed to be listening, we're probably just hearing because listening kind of requires comprehension. And studies show that just eight short hours after we listen to something or learn something new, we tend to forget about half of everything that we just learned. And two months down the road from that, we actually only retain about a quarter of that. So if listening has so many benefits and encompasses almost half of all communication, now this is where I was getting to, oops, why are we so terrible at listening? Well, one of the reasons is that most of us are born with two ears and they're capable of hearing. And so as a society, we simply assume that listening is a natural passive skill. It's just something that we're born with. But it's not. It's actually an active skill and it's something that we need to learn and practice and we can develop it over time. In school, how many of you attended courses that were dedicated to reading or speaking? Anybody raise hands? Yeah. How many of you attended courses that were dedicated to just listening? I see one hand in the very back. So, you know, we spend years devoted to learning how to read, how to speak, but almost no attention is given to the skill of listening. Aside from maybe our teachers or parents shouting, pay attention, open your ears, listen up. So we end up becoming decent readers, okay, speakers and poor listeners. And then we graduate into a world where we'll spend the majority of our time listening. And the problem with that is that listening is how we read people. And we interact with people all the time. Another issue that we run into is we have awesome brains. Our brains are actually capable of processing upwards of 400 to 500 words per minute. However, the average American speaks about 125 words per minute. And I'm sure a Singaporean speaker can't be much faster if you don't count the word law. So it's kind of like listening in slow motion up there. And it's really like the use or misuse of this spare thinking power that can make the difference between a good and a bad listener. Unfortunately, we tend to use this spare power for this concept called sandwiching. This is what sandwiching is. It's not eating a sandwich for lunch. But it's actually like, imagine you're in a meeting with your boss and they're talking about the plans for next week's big product launch. Right. And as they start to go on about how sharing for marketing is going to start putting together a social media post, you remember that you want to tell your boss about the successful meeting you just had with the client the other day. And as your boss starts talking about the schedule, you squeeze in this other quick thought about, man, it's really annoying when sharing taps on the table like that. It's the worst. And then another one about how great that meeting was. And then at some point you kind of lose track of what they were actually saying in the room. And then your boss asks you if everything sounds good and you say, yeah, yeah. Okay, sounds good. And you walk out of the room, maybe not knowing exactly what they were actually even talking about. Another brain problem that we run into is we have a finite amount of brain power. It's also known as executive function, which, you know, if we start feeling tired in the afternoon, this is kind of why. So if we focus on specific tasks for an extended period of time or we're making lots of decisions, we're kind of flexing that part of our brain called executive function. And just like our muscles, executive function has a limited capacity. So if I was to sit up here and do 100 squats, my legs would eventually turn to jello. And because I'm 35, that probably will happen after like 10. But I'd probably have some trouble walking and it would be kind of a tough time. And the same thing happens with our brain, right? So when our executive function is depleted, we've come less effective and we simply run out of the mental and emotional capacity that's needed for active listening. The other problem we run into is we have emotional filters. So if our brains weren't bad enough, we have these crazy things called emotions, right? And in different degrees and in many different ways, our ability to listen is also affected by our emotions. This is likely why politics feel so polarized today. It's because like social media and maybe Russian hackers have figured out and news outlets as well, figured out kind of how to hack our emotions with these like punchy headlines and emotional topics. And when we hear or see something that opposes the beliefs that are most deeply rooted in our deep rooted convictions, we tend to throw up an emotional filter and we stop listening. And instead of remaining open to new perspectives, we start maybe planning rebuttals or we start coming up with questions that might embarrass the speaker or we just shut down completely and start focusing on the thoughts that reaffirm our existing beliefs. On the other hand, if we hear or see something that supports those deeply rooted convictions and beliefs, it feels good. We start to remove any filters and we just kind of get lazy and accept all the things that someone's telling us and our critical thinking skills kind of get put out of commission and we focus on listening to the things that we want to hear. We become more willing to accept like half truths or fiction or alternative facts. One of the biggest problems that we run into and our cell phones. Some of the same technology that's supposed to be helping us to communicate more and help us improve maybe some of these soft skills are actually hurting us. How many of you have gone to a meeting or lunch where someone puts a cell phone on the table in front of you? Yeah, probably just about everybody. The problem that the problem with that is that the moment that you do that, it divides your attention, right? Studies have shown that even the mere possibility that one's phone could ring or buzz diminishes a person's cognition skills by up to 20%. And remember that we're only really retaining 50% of some of the stuff that we're hearing anyway, so we're already doing pretty bad. The phone also puts a barrier kind of between yourself and the speaker. It sends a signal that I'm not committing 100% to this conversation. Because of that, people tend to not have as deep of conversations, right? They tend to talk about things that they wouldn't mind having interrupted because their phone could light up at any moment in time. We also use our phones to escape this horrible thing called boredom, right? We never want to feel bored. But actually allowing yourself a moment of boredom is crucial to your brain. Remember that we have that finite amount of brain power? When you're bored, your brain actually isn't bored at all. It's kind of working and replenishing itself. And it needs that down time. It needs that little bit of boredom to kind of reset and refresh itself. So, beyond the biological, emotional, and technological reasons that we're bad listeners, we just straight up have a lot of bad habits. Rehearsing is one of my favorites. We're, rather than listening to someone else's point of view, you start forming your own arguments, you get your rebuttal ready. Filtering is another one that we have to be careful of. Especially when it comes to user research, right? We can easily filter out the things we don't want to hear and just focus on a couple of the good ones. I was in a, I presented some research one time and we had like nine bullet points that were like all bad things. And then we had like one good one at the end. And I went to a meeting with my stakeholder the next day. And all they did was talk about the one good point. And I was like, you missed the nine other ones. What are you doing? Advising. So this is another big one that we run into where maybe we start jumping into solutions too fast. Being a consultant, I'm especially bad at this one at home. My girlfriend often tells me, stop giving me suggestions about what to do, just listen to me. All right, now that we've established that's not entirely our fault that we're bad listeners. What can we do to become better listeners? Well, the good news is that literally just by attending this talk and being aware of some of these topics, you're already becoming better listeners. So you're welcome. In order to listen to someone, we need to listen to ourselves. And this is probably the most counterintuitive thing about listening is that we have to take that time to check in with ourselves before we even start a conversation or attend a meeting or a talk because we might realize that our current like emotional and mental state is not conducive to listening. We need to kind of figure out where we're at at that moment in time. Are we feeling stressed or exhausted? And this is why we did that four, seven, eight breathing exercises, because it's kind of like a quick way to recharge that executive function and maybe reset your baseline before you have to go into like an important meeting or have an important conversation. And if we're not ready to listen to that moment in time, just maybe reschedule the meeting or see if we can talk a little bit later or something like that. We can optimize our listening environments. Who feels like their office meeting room is an environment that's optimized for listening? Raise your hand. No? I think maybe the cell phones and the laptops definitely prevent that from being an environmental listening because we tend to get into that issue, right? Where we're putting up barriers between ourselves and the person that we're listening to. And so if you're in a meeting and you have your laptop open, you're probably sitting there typing away on emails or you're answering something else or you're just quickly checking something. So it's really important to remove those barriers between ourself and the person that we're trying to listen to. And so if you're maybe behind your desk or if you're on the opposite side of a big meeting room table, maybe just go to the other side and get a little bit closer to that person and be able to listen to them. Or even if you're just at home and you're on the couch and your loved one is over at the kitchen table, maybe just get up and go over and sit at the kitchen table and talk to them. One thing that I love that we do at Pivotal is we ban laptops and cell phones completely from important meetings. So if we're doing a kickoff for a big project, the laptops and the cell phones stay in the pockets or outside the room. In fact, I had this really interesting experience after I recently moved to Singapore and I was in this meeting and right mid-meeting, someone's phone rang and they picked it up and they started talking and they literally put their hand over the phone and they just had the conversation right in the middle of the meeting room and as if just slightly covering like this could stop the rest of us in the room from hearing their conversation completely. I was like, what the hell is going on? This is bizarre. Needless to say, they weren't a good listener. Good listeners tend to direct a maximum amount of thought to the messages being received. This leaves a minimum amount of time for these like mental sidetracks or that sandwiching that happens. They tend to try to maybe anticipate the next point that's gonna happen and if that next point is correct, that idea gets reinforced in their brain and if you guess wrong, maybe do just a little bit of sandwiching to figure out why that was different and it kind of refirms that thing. You could also start to evaluate the evidence that was presented by the speaker. Is this valid? Does this make sense? Is it complete? You can review and summarize the points of the talk so maybe during a pause you can kind of quickly in your head put together a quick summary of what's going on or what I like to do best in meetings is listen between the lines and I watch people's faces and I pay attention to their nonverbal communication so their expressions, their gestures and when they're speaking their tone of voice and does it add meaning to those spoken words or is it in contrast with that? If it is in contrast then what's actually really going on? A key skill that we can do is practice reflective listening and Ilker actually talked about this yesterday just a little bit but reflective listening is essentially like a two-part listening strategy, one where we listen actively to the content that's being spoken and once we have that kind of in our heads we repeat that information back to the speaker to confirm that what we heard is correct and doesn't make sense. It's kind of like the checkout cart of listening so are these the ideas that you want to purchase? Yes, okay cool, let's go forward. And the main goal is not to inject your own personal perceptions but to simply listen and confirm that what has been said and allow the speaker to then continue on speaking. So being a reflective listener doesn't always come naturally to us when we have a conversation with someone we naturally want to talk about ourselves and maybe we offer some advice or we want to tell stories or maybe agree or disagree with the speaker but reflective listening kind of forces us to set all that aside, let go of our egos a little bit and practice some genuine empathy for the speaker knowing that the speaker might get more out of this conversation than the listener. So what does this look like in practice? My first week has been really crazy there's so much going on and I'm worried that I'm not getting up to speed fast enough half the time when I'm in meetings I have no idea what's going on there are so many acronyms. Sounds like there's been a lot to take in. Yeah and then I feel really embarrassed when I didn't know and they continue on, right? So here the speaker hasn't really started to inject in anything about oh yeah my first week was really tough too and I didn't know what that acronym meant either. So when we use reflective listening it's good to use phrases like sounds like and then maybe paraphrase or repeat the idea or sometimes I'll say I'll like restate the idea and ask them to say all right tell me more about that and a pro tip when reflective listening is to pause. Pauses are your friend especially in user research as well. People tend to wanna fill those like awkward silent voids in with conversations and words and if you can wait like one second longer than the person you're talking to they'll fill that in for you and you don't have to do anything. So there's a lot of benefits to reflective listening like avoiding confusion, slowing down the dialogue, building empathy for the other person and as UX designers you can see how this is kind of a crucial skill when we're out doing user interviews. I also use it when I'm facilitating a meeting with clients or coworkers because it helps me pull more ideas of the people in the room and it helps make sure that everyone in the room is on the same page about the topic that we're talking about. Because this is a soft skill you have to be careful about how you use it, right? So if we look at this example this has been one of the worst weeks ever. I accidentally left the door open and my dog got out. She ran straight into the road and was hit by a car. I rushed her to the vet but it was too late. She died. Sounds like your dog died. So just be mindful about how and when you kind of repeat the content, right? So this is kind of like a horrible example of reflective listening gone wrong. In conversations like the one we just looked at you might want to practice interpretive listening. Interpretive listening helps us take reflective listening a step further by not only focusing on the content but also identifying the feelings behind what's being said. We have to look beyond the words and start looking for the physical signs like body language, facial expression. Are they leaning forward? Are they leaning back? Are their arms crossed? Are they open? Do they seem uncomfortable? Are they fidgeting a lot? Are they looking down? Or are they making eye contact? We also have to consider their tone, right? Do they sound excited? Are they frustrated? Are they skeptical? Are they depressed or upset? Are they speaking really fast? Or are they slow, casual? Are they speaking loudly or softly or is their voice becoming maybe shrill? There might be something going on. Then once we have an idea of that feeling just like reflective listening, we wanna share what we've identified with the speaker. So if we look at an example, when Mike missed a deadline again, I couldn't help myself, I snapped. I started yelling at him even though I knew it wasn't all his fault. I probably shouldn't have done that. It seems like you were stressed and frustrated about the deadline. Now that's over, maybe I sent some remorse. Yeah, reflecting on these feelings. I've been meaning to maybe go apologize. You can see that the listener is digging a little bit deeper, right? They're starting to pick up that this person obviously was feeling pretty stressed and frustrated about the deadline, and now that it's over, that person's like maybe not feeling so good about what played out. And you can't really see it in the text, but you can imagine that the speaker might be talking faster as they describe missing the deadline. And then once they get through that, maybe they kinda like hang their head a little bit as they reflect on the situation. And so when using interpretive listening, the listener needs to be able to interpret those verbal and nonverbal cues to help identify how that speaker's feeling. Also, when sharing with the speaker, it's best to kinda use a tentative voice. We don't want to like really assume what exactly what they're feeling, and so you might use phrases like it seems like or a sense that you feel and allow some room for that speaker to come back and correct you. Interpretive listening is when we really start to build empathy and connect with the person that we're speaking with. We start understanding not only what they're saying, but also kinda what they're feeling and what's going on behind the words. We're also telling the person that it's okay to have and express emotions. And as a society, I don't think we really do that all that well. And it's especially important when we're talking with our loved ones, right? We wanna make sure that they know that it's okay to feel certain ways and that we can understand and relate and empathize. If we wanna be good listeners, we also need to ask good questions. So as UX professionals, we should probably all already know this, but if we wanna be good listeners, yeah, we need to make sure that we're asking the right questions. Our goal with listening is to shift the focus to the other person and those awkward pauses and reflective listening, they're only gonna get us so far. Eventually, we're gonna have to ask a question to keep the focus on the other person. And when we do that, we wanna make sure that we ask good questions, right? So what are good questions? Good questions tend to be open-ended, right? They're who, what, when, where, and how questions, and they can't be answered as simple as yes or no. We talked about that a little bit the other day. They're well-timed. Sometimes this means that waiting for a pause in the conversation or allowing for silence, but don't wait too long, especially if you already missed the wedding. They should be phrased well. So instead of saying, why would you get invited to the wedding? Why do you think they didn't invite you to the wedding? Some examples of bad questions might be close-ended. So yes or no, are you married? Yes, no. Rapid fire questions. What are you doing for the honeymoon? Are you going to Bali? Isn't the food in Bali wonderful? Why don't you go to Bali? Questions containing the answer. So aren't summer weddings the best they are, aren't they? What, why did you ask? Just tell me summer weddings are the best. And we have to be careful with why sometimes. Even though we had like the five whys and we want to get down to the deeper level, sometimes we have to be a little bit careful with why, right? So why would you get invited to the wedding? That maybe seems a little harsh. So the Dalai Lama said, when you talk, you're only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new. So I hope that maybe you've learned something new for me today and two months from now as study shows, you remember a quarter of it. And so that when the army of automated algorithm-wielding robots comes to steal your job, you'll at least still be somewhat relevant. And I'd like to finish this talk with a quote from a journalist, Brenda Ulin's essay, called Tell Me More on the Fine Art of Listening. She says, we should all know this, that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role and the imaginative role. And the true listener is much more believed and magnetic than the talker. And she is more effective and learns more and does more good. And so try listening. Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends, to those who love you and those who don't. To those who bore you to your enemies, it'll work a small miracle and perhaps a great one. Thank you. All right, thanks, Boas. We have time for a few questions, although it's a very straightforward presentation. It's really meaningful. Any questions from the floor? Any questions from the floor? All right, there's one over there. Yeah, these things aren't perfect, right? They're just like, I don't know if I can think of an example off the top of my head, but you can imagine that in conversations, especially friends or loved ones, it might feel a little bit weird to only repeat the thing that they said back to them. I think sometimes I even feel a bit self-conscious about going ahead and doing that. But it's something that I'm definitely still working on. I can't think of a great example off the top of my head, but you saw from one example in the talk, things could go horribly awry even if you use some of these skills. Just have to be careful. Any more questions from the floor? Or we should move on to Slido first. So we have a few questions. So one of the top ones, do you advise taking notes while listening actively? A study shows that taking notes improves retention. Yeah, I know, when I have, so I'm a design manager at Pivotal Labs and I have reports and every week we do one-on-ones. And during those one-on-ones, I tend to bring like a notebook with me and I'll write down sort of key things that come up in the conversation. I do try to wait for them to pause or I say, okay, I'm just gonna take a note real quick. If I'm out doing user interviews, I always try to make sure that I have a note taker with me. So they're the ones who are focused on taking the notes and I can be more focused on the conversation and really actively listening to the person. And we do always try to record things and I'll go back and listen to them later and then take notes at that point, yeah. All right, for the second question, will you be sharing your slides? I think the organizers will help us out with that after the event. So let's just skip. And so, oh, okay, although it's not the top question, we have a very interesting question right here. Asians tends to be less open and tends to speak less. Does it mean we should speak more? I think the lesson was you should listen more. Yeah. Like how, what do you think of the balance between listening and speaking? Yeah, I mean, I think people can sometimes be naturally shy or maybe just don't speak a lot. Some people are actually a lot more comfortable in conversations with just having silence. I'm one of those people. So if you try to come talk to me during the networking session, I probably stood there awkwardly. Just be like. I'm okay with that. But yeah, I think, you know, obviously speaking skills are important as well. And if you feel like that's maybe, if you look at yourself and you feel like that's something that I'm lacking, maybe it's something we're digging into a little bit and exploring how you can be kind of a better speaker and speak more, yeah. All right. So next question, learning to listen is one thing, but how do you help others to listen? By giving talks like this. All right, that's for you. But what about people in the audience, maybe? I think it can be as easy as even just talking about listening as a subject, right? Be like, oh, did you know that these things cause us not to listen well? That could be one way to like sneak it into some of your conversations. You could maybe help them. So we should evangelize on the importance of listening. Yeah, possibly. I think that could be a good way to do it. So she asked, what if they don't listen? If they don't listen. I'm not gonna say that, I'm not gonna say there's hope for everybody. There's probably hopeless people out there. All right, there's a few passing questions I've seen. Basically the question is asking, what if the person is not willing to listen or like when you're listening to a person who tends to go off track, how do you handle that? All right, there's kind of two in there. What if the person doesn't wanna listen? I think one of the tactics that I mentioned is that just be really active about listening to them first. If you can take the time and show them that you're really listening, eventually they're gonna run out of steam. Like they'll go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, and maybe you have to wait half an hour, but eventually they're gonna run out of steam and since you were so actively listening to them, they're gonna be much more likely to take the time to listen to you at that point. So that question, I would say wear them out. How do you get someone to get back on track? This happens quite a bit in user interviews, right? Where someone starts talking about something, they go off on some tangent that's not related to the thing that you wanna talk about. And a lot of times I'll just find a good moment to redirect, basically. I'll just kind of say like, oh hey, yeah, thanks for sharing that. That's really interesting. Could you tell me more about this though? And that just kind of like shifts it right back over. So it's all about leading the conversation. All right, so this question is also very interesting. How do you decide when to stop listening? Like in the case, the user is giving irrelevant feedback. Yeah, user interviews aren't that long. So I would say like, just try to keep listening the whole time. If they're starting to give you irrelevant feedback or you're just like way off topic, yeah, feel free to redirect. That's when maybe that good question comes in of like saying, oh hey, thank you for sharing. Perhaps tell me some more about that, right? Just like I was saying, yeah. Wow, I think all these listening questions can keep on going. I think we'll take a few more. Do we have any more from the floor? Wow, you all are really active on Slido. Oh yeah, oh, oh, so it has something to do with your talk. So now they choose to listen instead of like ask questions. Well, this is- We should put this at the beginning, right? Yeah, we should do this, nevermind. Anyways, I think we can take one more question from Slido. I'll let you pick the question. I think how do you get your boss to listen to you is really interesting because there's power dynamics at play there, right? And it's gonna be tough. Especially if you have a boss who like never listens, the best way that I've found to be able to do is just try to be empathetic and really understand where your boss is coming from. There might be like certain pressures or things that they're going through that are causing them to neglect some of their responsibilities of being an active listener. And that's where again that trick of you can be the first listener and just kind of set the example and hopefully eventually they run out steam and the tables turn. All right, so I hope that advice from Ben Redd will help whoever is going to go back to their work tomorrow and maybe ask the boss to listen to maybe raise your salary or listen to your ideas. I hope it really helps. Anyways, thank you, Ben. Can we give him a round of applause? Thank you. Thank you.