Interest

Paying attention to what someone is saying is much easier if we are very interested in the topic being discussed. The challenge is that the business world is full of topics that only a few of us find very interesting.

In a business setting, when we are in a conversation, discussion, or meeting where a topic is not very interesting to us, most people cannot resist the temptation to let their mind drift off to somewhere else.

If someone is presenting quarterly sales figures, and we are not interested in quarterly sales figures, it won't take long before we start thinking about tasks we must get done, chores we have to do, or appointments we need to schedule. Before we know it, the meeting has ended, and we can barely remember anything that was presented.

This situation is very common, and one of the best reasons to carefully consider who should be invited to a meeting, as everyone attending a meeting should be interested in the topic being presented or discussed.

If you are giving a presentation and find yourself in a position where you feel people are not listening to you, consider the specific topic you are discussing, and how relevant it is to your audience. If the topic is irrelevant to them, don't be surprised if no one listens to you. It will not be personal, but just a mismatch of your topic and your audience's interests.

Where this becomes a problem is when the audience is not interested in the topic, but it is important that the audience listens to what is being said.

If the audience is not interested in quarterly sales figures, but sales figures directly impact which projects will or will not get funding, and everyone in the audience is working on one of these impacted projects, it is in their best interest to listen to what is being said.

As the presenter of a topic, therefore, one of the better techniques for getting people to listen to you is to link the topic to something your audience cares about in the first few sentences of your presentation. Instead of starting by reading dry figures and numbers, you might begin with, "All of you are working on projects funded directly from sales revenues, and if we miss our sales numbers, some of your projects may be canceled."

It can be difficult to figure out the perfect opening, so it is worth spending time carefully crafting and rehearsing how you will open your presentation. Your goal is to grab your audience's attention and get them interested in what you are saying, so that they stay engaged for the entire length of your presentation.

While it may seem like it is the sole responsibility of the presenter to get people to listen to them, we also have an obligation as professionals to pay attention to any work-related topic being discussed, no matter how much it does or does not interest us.

There are times when we will be invited to join meetings discussing topics we are not interested in. As a professional, then, there are generally two options: Our first option is to attend the meeting, and to make ourselves pay attention to everything being said, regardless of how interested we are in what is being discussed. Our second option is to contact the person scheduling the meeting and ask how this topic applies to you, and if it doesn't, politely request that you not be required to attend.

If we choose to attend the meeting, as professionals we must commit to paying attention, and listening to everything being presented. This is one of many implicit requirements of a professional attending a business meeting.

Having the discipline to pay attention to potentially boring topics becomes easier with years of experience, but at the very beginning of someone's career, it can feel impossible. One of the ways people learn to pay attention to seemingly boring topics, is they eventually get into trouble by not knowing something they should have known.

If someone at the start of their career attends a meeting to discuss sales figures, it is likely that their mind will drift, and over the course of the meeting their attention will fade, and at some point they will stop listening altogether.

However, once they have the unfortunate experience of being on a project that has been canceled, and they realize that the possibility of cancelation was discussed during one of the sales figures presentations, they start to learn a critically important lesson: professionals pay attention to seemingly boring topics not because of the boring information, but to find the critically important information.

This is the key to listening like a professional: realizing that the only way to find the information you are interested in is to listen to everything being said, whether it interests you or not.

Another hard lesson to learn is that you must listen even if you think you already know what will be said. This is an easy trap for anyone to fall into no matter how much experience they have.

The challenge is we don't know what we don't know, and we can't predict what someone is about to say. Our egos can often lead us astray, especially as we become more expert in our field. When we think we already know everything about a topic, we may think it appropriate to sit in the back of the room and take a quick nap. Aside from this being rude, it assumes that you know everything that could ever possibly be said on a topic, which is extremely arrogant.

No matter our expertise, no matter our level of experience, the world is constantly changing, and with change brings new information. This new information is often hiding amongst old information and can be very difficult to spot. The experienced expert, therefore, must never allow themselves to be lulled into a sense of false security, or to be hypnotized by what they believe to be a rehashing of the same topics. Letting down your guard and allowing tiny bits of critically important information pass you by, might be the difference between discovering a massive opportunity, and languishing in mediocrity.