Reading Notes

2023 Reading Plan:

1. Continuous Discovery Habits
2. Hypothesis Driven Development
3. Founding Sales
4. Startup Law and Fundraising
5. Crucial Conversations
6. Contract Drafting and Negotiation for Entrepreneurs and Business Professionals

Deep Listening with Intention

Four Communication Styles

1. People oriented: Pay attention to people as a whole
2. Content oriented: Homing on facts, data and content
3. Action oriented: Curious about what needs to be done and has been done
4. Time oriented: Stay one time and one schedule

When talk to a person, we should identify his or her preference in the first place: Thinking, Doing or Feeling. We also need to identify their goal of the conversation, i.e. framing. If an interaction is not viable, we should either terminate or postpone it.

A good listening follows three parts: comprehending, retraining, and responding.

How to retain?

The goal of retaining is to understand the full story of the partner trying to convey. To retain the story successfully could be done by asking:

1. What does that mean to you?
2. Wait, how did she approach that?

How to respond?

A good response could be executed as restating, reflecting and summarizing. For interpersonal conversation, making the people feel better something is far more important than knowing what to do about it. To do this, we need to follow 2 steps:

1. Identify the emotion by verbalize it before they say it out
2. Justify the emotion that it's expected to feel that way

Goal: Emphathetic Listening

We should react as we're hearing our partner's story for the first time. Respond th people's thoughts and feeling. Factual content is often less relevant

Sample responses (center at people's feeling):

1. I'm intrigued by your story
2. I can see how you'd feel that way
3. I get the sense that you are feeling

Transform a conversation

As a listener, we could

To transform a conversation, we have three major tools:

1. unconditional positive regard
2. active listening
3. empathy + reflection