Finally, an episode about listening

10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication

It’s our long-overdue episode devoted to listening. I read from Professor Katherine Schultz’s book on listening, and we do a quick exercise to help you think about improving your listening.

Maybe you are working on trying to reduce avoidable health inequalities. Or maybe you want to try to promote a more welcoming work environment. Or you’re just here to improve your communication or your patient education as a whole. In this episode, I’ll share something that can help with these problems and more. Yes, today it’s all about listening!

Hi, everybody. I’m Dr. Anne -Marie Lebel, and this is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, recently ranked number 20 of the top 100 podcasts and the social sciences by Goodpods. If you want to take your communication to the next level, we’ve got the way. BRIDGES is our continuous improvement process. We evaluate your communication on seven important dimensions to help you reach more people. For more information, visit healthcommunicationpartners.com or message me on linked.

And yeah, you are listening to me. You’re listening to this show right now, and I want to listen to you. So if it’s been a little while, get in touch! Message me on linked. Ask me a question, send me a message. You can also email me at annemarie at h-cpartners dot com. If you like what you hear, please leave a review on your listening platform of choice! If you’re on itunes, go to the show page, scroll to the bottom. If you’re using this show in a course, I’d love to know how it’s going and what students are doing, how they are taking it up.

Now I am embarrassed to say it’s taken me this long to do an episode just on listening. We’re ready to celebrate our seventh anniversary soon. I’ve got 180-some-odd episodes. And yeah, I talk about listening a little bit, but I’ve not dedicated a whole episode to it. And this is especially bad because I learned from the best about listening. I had on my dissertation committee, Professor Katherine Schultz, and she literally wrote a book on listening. So I’m going to read from some of Dr. Schultz’s book today, share some passages to inspire you and give you some new ways maybe to think about your listening.

And being curious about your communication is definitely a needed ingredient, but you’re listening to this show, so you’ve already got that.

At its most basic, we’re talking about how people address one another and talk to one another in the same space, the kind of expectations we have for how people are going to interact with one another. And what I really appreciate about Dr. Schultz’s work is it’s not just practical, it’s consequential. It has an impact. When you work on your listening, you actually can change things for the better. It can change the quality of the work that we do in our own sphere. And I want you to be able to get more out of each interaction that you have. and also help promote health equity and reduce avoidable disparities. Those things are important, right?

This is also going to be helpful for communication in the workplace. Because it’s it’s a way of looking at listening with a new lens. Some tools from a perspective you don’t always get to hear. So now Professor Schultz, like I am, is coming from the education world, and specifically the language and literacy space. And people who study language and literacy the way I do, it’s more than just how individuals are talking that we’re concerned with, although obviously that’s part of it. We’re also obviously looking at listening, and then the larger language patterns around us that we’re participating in. Because these shape how we listen, and how we talk, and how we respond. So we’ll look at how individuals interact with other individuals, but also interact with larger groups, and larger contexts.

So I can’t capture, and I wouldn’t try to capture, the deep work that Kathy Schultz’s book does. It’s called Listening: A framework for teaching across differences. but i’m going to read you a little bit from it, and give you some of its flavor. So you can get to know yourself a little better as a listener. Maybe learn something about some of your default listening modes. Here’s some passages from the opening pages:

“Locating listening at the center of teaching works against the notion that teachers talk and students listen, suggesting instead that teachers listen to teach and students talk to learn… Essential to this theory of listening is the proposition that listening necessitates action. That is, the act of listening is based on interaction rather than simply reception… Listening closely to students implies becoming deeply engaged in understanding what a person has to say through words, gesture, and action. Listening is fundamentally about being in relationship to another, and through this relationship, supporting change or transformation. By listening to others, the listener is called on to respond. The notion of listening to teach focuses on what to listen for, as well as how to listen. It emphasizes both the active listening and the actions that result from paying close attention to another.”

Now, this is from the start to Kathy’s framework, and the first part of it is “listening to individuals.” So I want to use that as a kind of jumping off point to do a little exercise. Not hypothetical.

I want you to actually think about your work schedule over the next coming days. When is your next meeting or appointment? When’s your next kind of scheduled interaction with another person? Who is it with?

Take a minute and find it, think about it, because I want to ask a couple of questions about this. What do you expect to hear from this person in this scenario?

I want you to catch that you do have expectations, and then see if you can identify any of them. This is because Dr. Schultz reminds us to be aware of how much pressure there is to make the individual fit into the whole. Fit into some predetermined larger script that we are all walking around with in our heads, right? So I want you to catch that you have expectations for this upcomin meeting or interaction.

And then I want you to think about: What do you think shaped those expectations?

Where did those expectations come from? maybe they’re historical. Maybe they’re from your profession. Maybe there’s another place that shaped the norms around what you should be listening for. Because these kind of norms can unintentionally imply that the rest of what that person has said isn’t as important as what you are usually listening for.

Given these expectations, your focus on whatever you’re listening for, what falls outside it might be hard for you to notice or hear. And you may wind up unintentionally tuning out and effectively excluding information that could be helpful or significant.

Now, what shapes these larger expectations we have for what we’re going to hear from a certain person in a certain scenario, are part of larger social patterns. Like notions of who is believable or who is trustworthy or who is healthy, who is competent. And all of these, of course, are culturally driven. These norms we can be unaware of that nonetheless shape the way we regard others and how we interpret their words.

So what Schultz invites us to do is to catch this pressure, acknowledge that we have these kinds of expectations that we’re going to fit an individual into a larger group, and instead: flip it.

Flip that script. Instead of trying to make the individual fit into the larger group, be ready to change our individual response based on the particularities of what we hear from an individual.

So what I’m suggesting, and what I think Schultz is suggesting, is this: Pay a little extra attention to how you pay attention.

The key issue to address is how our experience and larger forces shape our listening. We can get into routines or default settings and miss a lot! Opportunities for improvement can be right in front of you. For instance, information about how to reach people, what matters to them, what is important to them–they’re giving it to you in various ways through their communication with you. So listen closely and be ready to change or shape your response based on this precious information.

This approach also helps promote equity by individualizing individual people. Besides the fact that listening itself is a profound show of respect.

Communication is one of the most modifiable actions we do during the day, and it’s also one of the most impactful when we change it. It’s also kind of cheap, right? It’s free! if you just think about it, you can change your talking, right?

But communication is still hard. It’s human interaction. Some of the most complex phenomena there is in this world. and you care deeply and are working hard at it. I want to support your curiosity about your communication, support your innovation, and support making yourself more effective and efficient and locally-relevant ways. If you want more help in this process, give me a call. This has been 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. audio hearing and music by Joe Liebel. Additional music by Alexis Rounds. Thanks for listening to 10 minutes to better patient communication. From Health Communication Partners LLC, find us at healthcommunicationpartners .com.

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