From the Harvard Business Review:
You may have heard the saying, “When you’re in love, smoke gets in
your eyes.” Well when you’re talking, smoke gets in your eyes and ears.
Once you’re on a roll, it’s very easy to not notice that you’ve worn
out your welcome. You may not even realize that the other person is
politely trying to get a word in, or subtly signaling that they need to
be elsewhere (possibly, anywhere else if you have been really boring).
There are three stages of speaking to other people. In the first
stage, you’re on task, relevant and concise. But then you unconsciously
discover that the more you talk, the more you feel relief. Ahh, so
wonderful and tension-relieving for you… but not so much fun for the
receiver. This is the second stage – when it feels so good to talk, you
don’t even notice the other person is not listening.
The third stage occurs after you have lost track of what you were
saying and begin to realize you might need to reel the other person back
in. If during the third stage of this monologue poorly disguised as a
conversation you unconsciously sense that the other person is getting a
bit fidgety, guess what happens then?
Unfortunately, rather than finding a way to reengage your innocent
victim through having them talk and then listening to them, instead the
usual impulse is to talk even more in an effort to regain their
interest.
Why does this happen? First, the very simple reason that all human
beings have a hunger to be listened to. But second, because the process
of talking about ourselves
releases dopamine, the pleasure hormone. One of the reasons gabby
people keep gabbing is because they become addicted to that pleasure.
Not long after my book, Just Listen, came out, I too
succumbed to ignoring signs that I had started to annoy my friend and
fellow coach, Marty Nemko,
host of a radio show about work on KALW,
NPR’s San Francisco affiliate. He and I have been coaching each other
for some time. He hit a nerve when he told me, “Mark, for an expert on
listening, you need to talk less and listen more.”
After I recovered from the embarrassment, he pointed out a nifty
strategy that I have been using. It’s helping me and it might help
you.
Nemko calls it the Traffic Light Rule. He says it works better when
talking with most people, especially with Type A personalities, who tend
to be less patient.
In the first 20 seconds of talking, your light is green: your
listener is liking you, as long as your statement is relevant to the
conversation and hopefully in service of the other person. But unless
you are an extremely gifted raconteur, people who talk for more than
roughly half minute at a time are boring and often perceived as too
chatty. So the light turns yellow for the next 20 seconds— now the risk
is increasing that the other person is beginning to lose interest or
think you’re long-winded. At the 40-second mark, your light is red. Yes,
there’s an occasional time you want to run that red light and keep
talking, but the vast majority of the time, you’d better stop or you’re
in danger....MORE
