The most important social skill EP1

Summary

Three years ago Erik learned a skill that completely changed his life - and it only took one minute to learn it. In today's episode, you will get a chance to learn the most important social skill. It's an aspect of listening that will change how you act in all conversations.

Today's episode has been split up in four topics:

1. How will listening change your life?
2. What does it mean to be a great listener?
3. What's the best way to learn the skill listening?
4. What is the first thing that you have to do to learn the most important social skill

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Today's episode is a personal development episode, where Erik Bergman and Emil Ekvardt explore topics about how to grow as a person.

We are both personal development junkies and spend many hours every week sharing our ideas and reading about new things. This episode is great for you who want to learn about our latest perspective. We share lots of personal stories, talk about how it applies in our lives, and where we have learned it from.

1.In the first section of the podcast we dive into the question of "How will listening benefit you?" and we are looking at it from different angles.

How will listening help your relationships? How can listening make you a better entrepreneur or help you climbing the career ladder in the office? How can you use listening to get your parents to understand YOU better?

All of these are questions that we are adressing.

2.In the second topic we look in to what a great listener looks like. How is a conversation with someone who is really good at it, what are they doing that makes them good? How does it feel to talk to someone that is great at listening and how does it benefit the person being great at listening?

3.Thirdly we look at listening as the most important social skill and what it takes to learn it. How it can be enough with just one minute for you to completely change how you listen to other people. We are diving into when we realized the value of listening to others and how we wish that we would have realized it earlier in life.

4.In the final part we look at how you can start to become a better listener. What are the first steps to take? What do you do?

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Social media channels:
http://linktr.ee/smilingerik
http://linktr.ee/emil.e

Transcript

THE AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISO

[00:00:05] I would say, listen, twice as much as you speak, when you're talking to someone, when you're trying to learn this, just ask more questions and make sure try to get the other person to talk twice as much as you do. It's like a good first mindset, because if you choose the other person, then they will feel that you are interested. It's just a simple way of looking at it.

[00:00:49] I've made over 50 million euros before I turned 30, but looking back at this, I can see that there was one big mistake that almost took everything away from me. That was a mistake that would have been very easy to avoid. I was bad at listening. And I thought I was a good listener, but I realized looking back, that I was not in a couple of years ago, I understood that listening is a skill, an active skill that you can learn.

[00:01:26] And it's actually a pretty easy skill to learn. It's a lot easier than learning a language or learning how to play guitar. And since I learned it, my life has completely changed for the better and for you listening. If you take with you the techniques that we will talk about today, I promise you that your life will change as well.

[00:01:50] Welcome to the Becoming Great Dotcom podcast. This is the first out of three episodes where we will dive deep into the topic of how you can become a better listener. And I am here as always with my good friend Erik Bergman. He is the founder of Great Dotcom, our company that gives away 100 percent of its profits to save the environment before he found it great. He also founded the company Catina Media, a company that went from zero to 300 employees in less than five years. And Eric made over 50 million euros from that journey. And beside of great, he's also teaching personal development and entrepreneurship to his over two hundred and fifty thousand Instagram followers.

[00:02:42] Eric, hey. And as always, I'm here with my friend Email, who is the host of the Becoming Great dot com podcast. And it's also the host of our other charity podcast. And here's this annoyingly smart person. But I love learning things together with him. We do all creative tasks together and on the side of Great is also running a personal development coaching business.

[00:03:09] Three episodes. Eric, can you believe it? Yes, I can. And if you are coming here and listening for the first time, this is to become a great dotcom podcast. And our goal with this podcast is to be the podcast in the world that gives you the most value per minute. You listen within the field of personal development and entrepreneurship.

[00:03:32] I love that slogan, by the way. It's a phrase you haven't heard it before is because we've never said it before, but it's a new brilliance. Just made it up.

[00:03:40] And we can't accomplish this by spending a lot of time planning each episode, make sure they're well structured and that we don't waste your time by telling pointless stories. And we also have no advertisement in this podcast because we ourselves thinks it's kind of annoying when we listen to other podcasts and we get interrupted by advertisement breaks. So the next time you listen to some other podcast out there and you are annoyed by advertisement, think of us and our goal to bring you the most value per minute.

[00:04:13] You listen. We have sped up today's episode into four topics. The first one is how we're listening. Change your life, the second topic is what does it mean to be a good listener? So topic is, what is the best way to learn this skill? And a fourth topic is how can you get started?

[00:04:37] And after this episode, we'll do two more episodes on the same in the same genre of how to become a great listener. And first, we'll talk about what are the most important mistakes to avoid. And after that, we'll do a third episode talking about techniques to do to become a great listener. But now let's start with the first topic, how we're listening. Change your life.

[00:05:11] Eric, you said the best thing that has ever happened to your sex life was that you got good at listening. What do you mean by that?

[00:05:20] Hello, how are you saying that for the little smirky smile on your face? Well, three years ago or something like that, my sex life was pretty crappy with my my girlfriend. And we did manage to sort it out no matter what we tried. And then I read a book called Nonviolent Communication, which is about how to communicate and how to be a better listener. And that book really opened my eyes to this topic, or maybe you should say it years. And just by me becoming better listening to her, I realized that that kind of solved a lot of tiny conflicts that have been going on for a very, very long time between us. We've been together seven years at a time and I could see how those tiny little conflicts was constantly there and taking away the romantic energy between the two of us, like we were always a little bit annoyed by something. And I didn't know how to listen to her. I didn't really hear her messages. So once I got better at listening, once they understood what actually was bothering her, we could solve a lot of those disputes and a lot of the romantic energy between us actually came back.

[00:06:39] You said something about a day that really stuck with me, and that is everyone knows that people that are in love for the first year, it's just hearts and roses everywhere. And then you kind of get into almost becoming more friends. And maybe that is why there are a lot of divorces, as you told me, that after one year, it's not that attraction goes away. It's just that you start getting annoyed at each other and that kills the romance. Do you think that kind of happened to you and your fiancee?

[00:07:08] Yeah, definitely. I say that because that's what I have experienced. I believe that the longer you go into a relationship, the more unresolved small disputes you've had. The more times she said something that bothered me that I didn't speak out about, the more times she did something else or I did something and that annoyed her. And we kind of drift slowly, slowly apart because there is a thousand tiny battles that never got solved. And I believe that happened in any relationship. And I believe that one of the reasons why love is so passionate, the first six months of a relationship that you don't have those disputes, you don't have five years of unresolved issues with each other because you don't really know each other.

[00:07:57] Everything is perfect.

[00:07:59] Everything is perfect. I'm sure there are hormones and all other things as well.

[00:08:02] But personally, I believe that that plays a really big role because I can see how we are very much more in love now than we've ever been before. And I can see how much of that comes from from solving these issues and from me getting better at listening. So, yeah, I think in a relationship, it's it's definitely essential. But let's switch gears a little bit so that I know that listening I've had a big impact on your career. In what ways has helped you to become a better listener? Right.

[00:08:30] Well, I on site of great to have a coaching business and my job there is to listen and listen, not just sitting and watching someone, but understand how to ask good questions and steering conversations into areas that are relevant for the other person that can help them. And I see in when working with great as well how important it is to be good, because small conflicts comes up all the time, and being good at guiding people by being a good listener can really help to make someone understand, be motivated and inspired to go in the direction a leader wants them to go.

[00:09:16] Do you think that you could have around the coaching business if you hadn't practiced to be a good listener?

[00:09:22] No, no, no, no, that's interesting.

[00:09:25] So just learning how to listen actually created a completely new career path.

[00:09:31] Oh, yes, for sure. And you have way more experience than I have in business, so as someone that listens to this might be running their own company or they might be employed, how would you say being a good listener can benefit them?

[00:09:45] I think that one of the crucial things, if you're employed, is to understand firstly what?

[00:09:52] Well, two things. What does your manager actually want or how do they feel about you or things around you? And what does your clients or customers actually want and how do you feel about them? And if you are good at listening, you will be much better at understanding them. And if you understand both your manager and your clients, you will be much better at actually helping them are doing what they need and you can advance much, much faster in your career. But if you are not a good listener, if you are what I used to be more of a talker than a listener, you end up doing things that well, I ended up doing things that I thought were good and I thought that other people wanted.

[00:10:33] But because I actually had listened to them, who understood them, I didn't actually do the things they really cared for. So I believe that learning how to listen will immensely help any career or any business.

[00:10:48] So when you can understand what they want, you can also provided to them.

[00:10:52] Yeah, definitely. So I think that it helps in in so many ways, I know on your Instagram account.

[00:10:59] One of the most common questions you get asked is maybe not one of the most common, but a common question you get asked is my parents do not listen to me or maybe my girlfriend don't listen to me. So what can someone do when no one is even listening to them?

[00:11:14] Yeah. So I think a very common question. My parents don't understand me. I'd say that's the most one of the most common questions that I get. And my reply is always, do you understand them? And this is a question that seems to kind of put people off. It's like I haven't thought about that. And I think that this is so key that we want other people to understand us. We want other people to listen to us, but we don't necessarily listen to them. And I tell often teenage young men who wants to start companies and their parents want them to go to school. That's a very common situation. And I tell them, start by listening to your parents, start by asking questions, your parents. Why is it so important to them that you go to school, spend the first hour just trying to understand them, and it's much, much more likely that they then will try to understand you? It's just that if you don't try to understand them, they will be so busy trying to get you to understand them that you both get stuck. And I've heard lots of people reaching out to me afterwards, like, hey, Eric, it really worked. My parents listened to me. We understood each other. And either they actually want to start school now because they understand or like, OK, my parents have approved. I can give this one year or things like that so we can help all kinds of situations with your parents or relationships. This is an amazing in many ways we're learning how to listen is wonderful. And I just wish that someone would have taught 16 year old Eric this. I didn't have to mess around and mess up for the next 11, 12, 13 years.

[00:12:59] It's a huge mindset shift to focus on what the other person want instead of trying to yell out what we want. So let's move forward and look at what is the best way to learn this skill of listening.

[00:13:21] So what is the first thing that you think of when you hear the words good listener for me, at least if I go back to my twenties, I would definitely imagine someone sitting still with eyes open. Yes, they are like a deer or a child at school listening to a teacher.

[00:13:43] Paying attention, it's kind of a dorky thing, right? You don't see the cool, you don't hear the words good listener and think cool guy.

[00:13:51] Not at all. The cool guy was just standing on a table with all the girls around him speaking and telling stories.

[00:14:00] Yeah, that was me. Yeah. No, unfortunately, in your dreams, I think that's interesting because the thing that comes into my head when I hear the words good listener is an obedient child that just sits quietly when they're their parents are talking. So I believe one of the reasons why I didn't think of becoming a good listener didn't realize this before, that I don't have a positive association to being a good listener. It doesn't sound like something I would want to make an effort to accomplish and that would lead you to being left out, not being heard.

[00:14:38] And if you want to be heard, you better make sure that the other people pay attention to you.

[00:14:43] It's interesting. So what do we mean when we say good listener?

[00:14:48] A good listener is someone that is skilled at bringing a conversation to a place that is important for the other person? And also interesting to you, the one who is listening.

[00:15:00] Ok, so someone is good at listening, is good at asking questions, then.

[00:15:03] Yeah. Good at asking questions and good at showing enthusiasm. When someone shares something that is interesting to us.

[00:15:11] Ok, so if you're having a conversation with someone who's good at listening, what does that look like?

[00:15:16] I think you are very good at listening. But let's look at someone else I know. Let's look at our colleagues spirit. Yeah. Let's look at things like this is a guess. A very good listener, very good listener, super passionate about this fishing spirit. He's a listening spirit. Right. So.

[00:15:33] When I say something, I'm always I'm always the one talking when spirit is around, this is very good at getting other people to talk and he he's always asking questions. That is that I maybe haven't thought of before. And he's asking questions that make me think. And look at. Yeah, look at things that are interesting for me from another perspective, he makes me smarter with the questions he's asking and he's always yeah, and he's also encouraging and I can tell he really wants to know more about me. He really wants to go deeper and know me and get to know me more.

[00:16:15] Makes you smarter. I think that's a crucial thing. And that's a good listener is then good to understand what's important to you, but also good to good at figuring out what questions can bring this this further and then obviously giving you a lot of space to talk, because if he would be talking all the time, he wouldn't have the opportunity of finding these things.

[00:16:36] Exactly. And it's a terrific leadership skill. He is making people grow up, making you smarter.

[00:16:43] In what other way do you feel that it benefits you to be talking to Spirit?

[00:16:48] Well, it's highly enjoyable that I get to speak about the things that I'm most passionate about, things that are interesting to me, or maybe challenges that I'm going to. And what he's doing is putting all of his attention towards me. And I keep asking questions on that topic. I think often in conversations, someone ask one question and then maybe to switch topics and switch another topic. But Spirit stays with his focus and he allows me to go deeper and deeper so I can understand myself better.

[00:17:21] And that makes that makes a lot of sense. How do you think it benefits spirits to be a good listener?

[00:17:28] I think a bit why I hang out with him a lot for the reason that he's so good at this. I think it's a big reason why he is ingrate and why he's one of the people that is one of mine and your closest friends. It's so neat that someone can provide this gift of attention to.

[00:17:47] Do you feel do you feel that he's genuinely interested in these things as well? Like, is he genuinely interested in the things that you talk about? Yeah, because then that's an important part of this, that he's obviously asking questions that takes you deeper, that he's coming from a place that actually being genuinely interested in it. So it's also good at picking the questions which he enjoys, which sounds like a key part in this.

[00:18:10] Yeah, exactly. So Spiritist, I don't think he's very much into football. I never heard him talk about it, which means that he wouldn't keep asking questions on a topic of football. But he's very interested in understanding other people's challenges and emotions and interests. And there is where he puts his attention, because that is what his genuine interest is. So he actually gets to talk about the stuff that he really cares about and areas where he wants to learn.

[00:18:39] And I can see that when at least when I talk to spirits, when when we kind of done exploring me, I kind of feel that I want to give him all of my attention. I really want to ask a lot of questions. I want to understand him. I want to reciprocate that favour. In a sense, it becomes. I can see that he get a lot of valuable attention back, it's like he starts by getting and it gives a lot and then I feel that I really want to give him I don't want to continue talking forever. I want to direct all of my attention to it.

[00:19:12] Exactly. And that's Bill. So it's the same dynamic works in relationships and in business and everywhere. Yeah, right. So let's move on to topic three. That is what is the best way to learn how to become a good listener.

[00:19:39] Most of the social skills that I have today, I have kind of picked up along the way when I was in my 20s, I have felt a lot of anxiety in most social situations. If it was just being with my gay friends or if it was being out on a party trying to meet the girl and looking back at it, I can see that a big problem is that I tried to be cool and like you and I defined before Eric the cool guy. What I thought was cool was extroverted people because those seem so have it's so easy being social. So imagine that guy, you know, on the table speaking effortlessly, being surrounded by all the girls. And I tried to be that. I tried to be funny, talk a lot, say interesting things.

[00:20:30] And that was costing me a lot of anxiety because I'm a quiet, introverted person. I believe one of the biggest shifts in my mindset that transformed my social skills is this one I heard from someone I can't remember where. It's better to be interested than being interesting. It was such a relief of my shoulders to not having to be the entertainer because that's not really me. Instead, I could be someone that was very good at asking questions and letting other people entertain.

[00:21:07] I love that quote. It comes from the How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. And he also says that you will make more friends in two months trying to be interested than you will in two years, trying to be interesting. And it's exactly the same thing that just just by giving your attention to people and making them feel valued and that you see and hear them, that will make so much more difference. And trying to be the cool guy, because I think that it's another thing I heard from I think it was a video on Charisma Command, YouTube channel about social skills. And they said that if you meet a cool guy, you leave that conversation thinking, I wish that he liked me. But if you have a conversation with a nice guy or someone you enjoy being with, you leave that conversation thinking, I really liked him. And it's such a big difference. And that's exactly what you're touching upon here, that if you be interested in other people, people will leave that conversation, feel that they like you, not that they tried to impress you.

[00:22:23] Exactly. And the shift in energy, at least to me, is when I'm entering a conversation trying to be interested, it feels like I'm giving to someone else. I'm giving them my attention. But if I'm being interested, I'm kind of trying to get social status or something out of that situation. And if you're trying to be interesting, I'm trying to get attention instead of giving attention.

[00:22:46] So do you think it's a skill then to learn to be interested?

[00:22:52] I know it's a skill because I've learned it from scratch. I was not good at this.

[00:22:56] Maybe you have a similar experience, I think, to become a good listener. I'm not sure if those are really the same thing, but at least they tie a lot into each other for for sure.

[00:23:10] Would you say that it's hard to learn?

[00:23:12] No, not very. So it's probably one of those things that gives you the most value per minute you spend learning it. It's definitely easier than learning a language. It's definitely easier than learning to play the guitar. And it's way, way more valuable because you can use it everywhere. Yeah, definitely. So how long would you say that it takes let's say someone has low social skills and low listening skills, how long time would you say it would take to learn to get really good at it?

[00:23:45] To learn to get really good at it is one thing, but to learn to just get good at it, but is significantly better. It takes less than one minute. I would say at least it did for me, because it's just how it's just a mindset shift. It's just it's enough information in the sentence. It's better to be interested than to be interesting. If you just switch there. If you understand that sentence, you're a better listener right after that. And that's the way I experience it. I read this in a book and I was like, ha! And I shifted my mindset from trying to impress other people to trying to be impressed by other people, I try to understand them. I try to hear what they say. Before, I hadn't really tried to hear what they say. I mean, think about when you're coming to a party or whatever, and you're supposed to introduce yourself to five people. And before I just shook my hand, I said my name and I didn't even listen for the other name. And if I did, I didn't try to remember it. And then I said hi to five people and I didn't know any of those names. And just if you just shift your mindset, say, OK, I'm going to try and remember these names, I want to say that this is important to me immediately. You're a hundred times better, probably. I understand remembering names because now we try to hear them. So it's the same kind of mindset shift. It's not hard to be a really good listener like you describe Spirit before. That's a lot of practice that to become at least twice, if not ten times better than I used to be. That was one minute. And understanding the concept of that, you can actually learn to be a good listener. And that is more important to be interested than to be interesting.

[00:25:39] That is. Maybe the best sentence I ever heard that have helped me the most. Yeah, so let's move on to topic for that is what is the first thing you can do to get started? OK, so the first minute and a mindset shift has passed, what can someone do now to get started towards becoming a better listener?

[00:26:12] I'm not sure that the first minute has passed. So I think that that's the crucial part. Go back and make sure that that minute has passed. Make sure that the image that you get in your head when you hear the phrase good listener is not the nerd in the front of the classroom giving apples to the teacher. The image you want to see when you hear the word good listener is someone who is happy, has a lot of friends, a successful career, and feels content with life. But I think that's a crucial part to understand about being a good listener. And then second thing then is what we just touch upon, like it's better to be interested thing interested and interesting. It turns into and if you want to break that down in like a few specific steps, I would say just listen twice as much as you speak. When you're talking to someone, when you're trying to learn this, just ask more questions and make sure try to get the other person to talk twice as much as you do. That's a good first mindset, because if you if the other person are, then they will feel that you are interested. Just a simple way of looking at it. And second part of that is just ask more questions. Like I didn't used to ask a lot of questions. I used to speak in statements. I used to tell my own stories. Whenever someone started a story, I kind of went into my story. So I switched stories for questions and listened twice as much as where where I would start.

[00:27:49] Or would you say, I really liked what you said about a good listener has an easier time making friends. And I would take that even a step further and say that someone that is a good listener will make friends with almost everyone they meet. At least that's that's my experience, that when I try to be interesting, only the people who thought I was interesting wanted to hang out with me. But by being interested, most people enjoyed my company.

[00:28:16] I like that. That's really good. By trying to be interesting. Yeah. So imagine if you're a famous football player or whatever, then people who like football would really want to spend time with you. But people who don't give a shit about football would not. But if you're around, someone is genuinely curious and interested and make you feel seen and heard, then that's a different thing. Exactly. OK, so why are we doing this in in three episodes? It sounds like this was just one and now everyone is great listeners.

[00:28:45] You're exactly like there's so many parts of being a good listener. Right. So now we kind of went through what is the mindset you want to have? And we want to highlight that this is a skill that you can improve and how important it is to learn this in the next episode. Episode number two, we're going to look at mistakes that makes us bad listeners.

[00:29:05] And we've done them so many times. We have done them so. And I cringe when I think of all the mistakes that I've got.

[00:29:12] Yeah, there's a lot of value in that episode because we could have made two or three episodes on mistakes, but we boiled it down to the most important ones. And that is coming up next.

[00:29:20] I think they're like ten mistakes or something that is easy to avoid and easy to understand.

[00:29:24] Easily fixable. Yeah. And what is the third episode arc?

[00:29:29] So that's technique's when we like going into how can you ask the deep questions, but also how do you find the deep questions like you touched upon was buried before. He's really good at asking questions that make you smarter and make you understand yourself better. And it's actually a technique thing. It's not just something that you are born with, but how do you find those questions and what do you listen for? And that's what the third episode will be about when we're just diving into all of that.

[00:29:57] I'm really looking forward to episode two and three because they're going to be very practical. The first episode was more philosophical, so I'm looking forward to get more hands on. So, Eric, before someone leaves today, what is the last piece of advice you would like to give them?

[00:30:11] If you're listening? If you want to make your life better in general, then make sure that when you're going to and from work, don't let that time go to waste.

[00:30:25] Uster time listening to a podcast or books that makes your life better. If you do that continuously, I promise you that you will change into a better person, a happier person at least. And if you haven't listened to all of our episodes, we have seventy five episodes or so now in the back catalogue. So next time you see that bus coming or you open that door to the car and get in and pick up your phone, find one of our old episodes, think about us and learn some more value and change your life for the better and in some ways to help us. What can they do then?

[00:31:03] Something super cool that maybe not all people know is that. If you press subscribe, that will really help us get into different top lists on iTunes and Spotify so we can reach more people with these messages because the top lists are based on the amount of subscribers in relationship to the amount of listeners. So even though we are tiny podcasts, we can still get into the top list. And thanks to all of you guys that have already subscribed, we can already see us rank racing up in the rankings. And that's super exciting for us to kind of see the snowball rolling. Yeah.

[00:31:43] Thank you so much for all your guys that have actually subscribe. We greatly appreciate it. We feel inspired to keep going. And we'll see you next week for another episode on how to become a wonderfully kick. As amazing listener, let's become greater to techo.

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