Lead On Podcast

On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses his personal journey to overcome poor listening habits and the practical steps leaders can take to develop active listening skills. He explores common barriers to effective listening, different types of listeners, and shares five actionable practices that have helped him—and can help you—become a more attentive and empathetic communicator.

Creators and Guests

Host
Jeff Iorg
President, SBC Executive Committee

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Ready to hone your leadership skills and unlock your full potential? Tune in to the Lead On Podcast, where Jeff Iorg dives deep into Biblical leadership.

Hosted by SBC Executive Committee President Jeff Iorg, this dynamic podcast provides insight for seasoned executives, aspiring leaders, or those in ministry who are simply passionate about personal growth. The Lead On Podcast offers actionable, practical tips to help you navigate the complexities of ministry leadership in today's ever-changing world.

From effective communication and team building to strategic decision-making and fostering innovation, each episode is packed with valuable lessons and inspiring stories to empower you on your leadership journey.

Put these principles into practice and Lead On!

Jeff Iorg:

Welcome to the Lead On Podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, talking with you once again about practical issues related to ministry leadership. Thanks for joining me on the podcast today as we talk about an issue that has been an important one, but a struggle for me for most of my life. Recently, was in a leadership teaching situation and one of the participants, said, doctor Orge, can you share with us a leadership failure or a time when you've really struggled? Well, that would have taken several days to unpack, but I decided instead just to focus on the one and so I wanna tell you about that one today.

Jeff Iorg:

One of the most significant weaknesses in my life as a leader has been my poor listening skills and my inability to really listen to other people. Now, I discovered this problem a number of years ago and started working on it, and it has been a lifelong process for me, working to learn to be a better listener. So I wanna talk with you today about listening skill development. Now, that's the first thing that shocked me about this when I first recognized that I had a problem. I thought listening was just some of those natural things you did, like breathing.

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But I learned that listening skills can actually be taught and actually be learned. And so I set out to do that. And I researched at one point in my life about 300 primary sources on listening skill development. I read books on it. I read mag magazine and journal articles.

Jeff Iorg:

I really did a deep dive on this issue for several months, a number of years ago. And I came away from that learning a good deal about what I didn't know, but also with some practical tools in hand that I could use to make me a better listener. So I wanna talk with you today on the podcast about some of the things I've learned that have helped me in listening skill development. The first

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thing I learned was what some of the barriers were to being a good listener. And the first one is particularly It is a prideful attitude toward others. When you

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are not a good listener, it may be driven by a subtle arrogance that other people are really not that interesting or even that important.

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A prideful attitude about listening that devalues other people and puts up a wall between you and hearing what they're trying to communicate. Another barrier is lack of concentration. It's

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being distracted by something or being bored by what you're hearing or by thinking, I've heard this before, same song, second verse, Here we go again. Lack of concentration or distractions. Another barrier is sometimes vocabulary or culture or language, especially if you're working in a multicultural environment or in a situation where people come from different backgrounds or different, perspectives. And even some of those can be, culturally, shaped in ways that are offensive to you. Like, for example, if you've worked in a military culture or in a professional sports culture, you know there's a lot of profanity in those cultures.

Jeff Iorg:

And so because of that, you can find yourself tuning out or turning off or being put off by people and by what they're saying. That's what I'm talking about when I say that vocabulary or culture or language can really be a barrier. Another barrier for me is sometimes judgments about the sender or about the person who's trying to communicate with me. I'm angry with what they're telling me. I'm frustrated by having to listen to them again.

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I'm impatient with the fact that it's taking them so long to get out whatever is they're trying

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to say to me. Just judgments about the sender. Here's another barrier,

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fatigue or daydreaming or mind wandering, just drifting off. Your eyes are open. You're looking at the person. Your mind is a million miles away. And then as I've already said, another issue for me was just lack of listening skill development.

Jeff Iorg:

I I had never that I could ever remember had anyone teach me anything about how to be a good

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listener. When I was in a communications class, it was almost always about how to how to deliver material, how to be more eloquent, how to sound more interesting. It was never about how to listen more intently.

Jeff Iorg:

So these were all see, are some of the barriers, but all of these barriers fit me in one way or another. Well, when I started confronting the problem, I discovered that there are about three levels or kinds of listeners. The first is what some people call a marginal listener. Now these are people who hear words but or hear sounds, I should say, but but don't really pay much attention to the words. They're they're really not very dialed in.

Jeff Iorg:

They they really don't have much awareness of what's being said to them, and they certainly aren't attentive to any kind of emotional nuance of what's being said, marginal listeners. I was so happy when I learned about these people because I realized I'm not that bad. Made me feel pretty good there for a minute. I thought, well, I'm not a marginal listener. I'm way beyond just hearing sounds.

Jeff Iorg:

I actually hear words, and I do get meaning, and I am attentive to meaning, and I I'm emotionally dialed in. I know people are speaking with emotion and that I should be paying attention to that. Well, my short lived happiness didn't last long.

Jeff Iorg:

I moved on to the second kind of listener, and this is what is sometimes called an evaluative listener, and this is me. The main

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characteristic of an evaluative listener

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is that they listen only to form a reply.

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So while someone's talking to you, you're only hearing

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the words and gathering the meaning so

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that you can rebut or respond to or have a comeback to them. You're thinking more about your response than about what they're truly communicating. You're thinking more about what you wanna say back than you are about understanding the fullness of what they're saying to you. Listening so you can form a reply

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is the first descriptor of an evaluative listener. Man. When I read that, it hit me right between the eyes. That's me. I find myself mainly listening so that I can form a response.

Jeff Iorg:

Evaluative listeners also are great at hearing the words, but not at understanding the full meaning. They have an insensitivity to nuance, to tone of voice, to tilt of head, to other body language cues. They can tell you exactly what was said, but they move too quickly beyond or past that and can't tell you what was really meant by what was said. They hear the words,

Jeff Iorg:

but they don't hear the full meaning. Once again, guilty is charged. As an evaluative listener who's primarily listening to form an opinion or a form of response, I'm also really good at analyzing the words you're using and picking apart your vocabulary and making sure that you're precise in what you say, but not so much in getting the meaning.

Jeff Iorg:

Yes. There have been times when my wife and I have been in conversation and I have actually critiqued her use of a word, helped her

Jeff Iorg:

to understand. No, that's not what that word means. Rather than trying to listen to what she was trying to communicate by the words she was choosing.

Jeff Iorg:

Yes. I have actually done this on more than one occasion where I have been focused entirely on the words

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and missing the meaning of what was being communicated. Evaluative listeners, by the way, are great on facts and figures and statistics and semantics,

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but not so much on empathy, sensibility, understanding. They get the data, they know the facts, they're willing to have the argument, but they miss often the true meaning of what's being communicated.

Jeff Iorg:

Now, when I started studying these categories of listeners and I saw that I wasn't a marginal listener, I was really encouraged. Then I moved on to learning about evaluative listeners, and I was very discouraged because in this, I saw myself. I find myself listening to former reply, hearing the words but not understanding

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the full meaning, focusing entirely on

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the facts and the figures and the semantics and the, the precision of what's being said and missing entirely the meaning of what's being communicated. Well,

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that's where I found myself.

Jeff Iorg:

And then I discovered there was a third category of listeners, and these are what are often called active listeners. And I knew that I needed to become one of those. So what's an active listener? Well, an active listener hears both the content and the intent of the messages being sent. So we understand An active listener understands the words, but they also understand the meaning that's being conveyed by those words and the intent of the message even though the vocabulary may not be quite that precise.

Jeff Iorg:

Active listeners are aware of verbal and visual signals that help us understand meaning, and also they practice what's called attending, that is they give back verbal and visual signals to indicate that they are listening, that they're receiving, that they're understanding. And then active listeners probe. They probe for deeper understanding. They probe for feelings. They probe for nuances.

Jeff Iorg:

They learn to ask questions like, do I understand you correctly? Can you help me understand that better? You seem really troubled by what you're telling me. How are

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you feeling about that right now? Now, this

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is not some kind of constant counseling session, but it is instead learning some active listening skills that help probe until you really fully understand what someone is trying to say to you about a particular issue or in a particular moment. So active listeners hear content and intent. They're aware of verbal and nonverbal and visual signals which communicate and also how to give those back to facilitate communication, and they are probed. They probe for feelings and issues and nuances. Now, these active listeners have have three skills that are often described, sensing, attending, and responding.

Jeff Iorg:

What are these important skills? Well, sensing is recognizing and appreciating the full scope of communication, not just the words, but also the nonverbals, so that you pick up on facial expressions, body language, and other kinds of nonverbal cues that help underscore or actually clarify the words that were being used. Attending is when you are sending signals to the sender, to the person who's communicating with you, indicating that you're attentive, receptive, and acknowledging that what they're saying to you really matters and is being

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communicated. Attending, it can be something as simple as

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the nod of a head saying in a simple nonverbal like, yes. I see. Something like that. It it can be a smile. It it can be a shifting of your body so that you communicate more openness to the person who's talking to you.

Jeff Iorg:

There are all kinds of attending things that we can do to send signals to the person who's speaking to us that we're attentive and receptive and acknowledging what they're saying to us. So sensing, attending, and then responding. And responding is having a dis The discipline of keeping the sender engaged with you until you really receive their message that communication has actually been achieved and that you've really come to true understanding of what's being communicated. So responding means, I'm gonna stay with you until we get to the point where I'm completely clear on what you're saying to me, and I really understand what you're communicating. Sensing, attending, responding.

Jeff Iorg:

These are the three important skills of active listeners. Well, so far on the podcast today, I've talked about some barriers to good listening, and I've talked about three categories of listeners. Marginal listeners, which most of you are not, evaluative listeners, which unfortunately a lot of you are, and then active listeners, which is what we wanna become, where we're really engaging people and we are listening in ways that are truly transformational. So getting to the most practical part of the podcast today, I wanna give you five

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practices that will help you become a more active listener.

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Five practices to help you put into practice sensing, attending, and responding,

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and help you become a more

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active listener. And I share these because

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they are five of the things that I've really worked on, really now for a couple of decades to try to become a better listener. Number one, focus some energy on listening. Focus some energy on listening.

Jeff Iorg:

This happened as recently as last night. Anne was talking to me, and I realized, two or three sentences into the conversation that I had no idea what she'd been saying. My mind was wandering onto work problems and other issues. She was telling me something, and I had

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to stop and say, Anne, I'm sorry. Could you back up and tell me that again? But this time, when I said that, I turned to face her, I cleared my mind, and reminded myself, pay attention. Focus on listening. Give energy to this moment right now.

Jeff Iorg:

And

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Anne, because she's a kind person and because she's seen me on this learning curve for a long time, smiled and said, sure. And she started over and she told me again what she was telling me, but this time I got it. I was focusing energy on listening. Now, for some of you who are naturally empathetic, who are really connected with people, who are in tune with all of this, you're thinking, does not doesn't everybody know to do this?

Jeff Iorg:

No. We don't. So that's why

Jeff Iorg:

I'm telling some of you who are listening today, step one, bring some energy to the task. Focus yourself and realize I gotta put some effort into this thing if I'm really gonna become a better listener. Even in the moment, I'm gonna have to say to myself and to the other person, hey, can you give me that one more time? And I'm really focusing right now. I wanna really pay attention to what you're saying to me.

Jeff Iorg:

So focus some attention on listening. Second, fight off distractions.

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Now these can come at you in a lot of different ways depending on who you are and where you are and the personality you have and the location where you are even physically trying

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to have the conversation. Let me give

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you some distractions that I've had

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to struggle with over the years. The first one are what I call emotionally laden or emotionally packed words. There are some words that that that are trigger words really for me. And when I hear them, I get angry, I get distracted, I get frustrated.

Jeff Iorg:

And when those things happen, I'm no longer listening actively. I'm distracted by the words that are being used and I find myself spinning off in if you will, into a previous experience or into another context or into some response to that word that really distracts me from hearing the person who's trying to communicate with me.

Jeff Iorg:

Another distraction are what I'll call speakers' idiosyncrasies, things that people do that are just difficult and make it hard to pay attention to what they're saying. Now, some of these have been challenging over the years. I think about people who have poor personal hygiene, for example, and who come to meet with me or talk with me, and it's difficult for me

Jeff Iorg:

to focus because of the odor or because of their habits or something like that. It's also hard when people have a verbal tic, something they say over and over again that becomes a distraction. No doubt, the most dramatic example of this happened while I was in seminary years ago working on a crew that was painting houses, putting ourselves through school as painters. We were painting the exterior of a guy's house,

Jeff Iorg:

and older guy wanted to come

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out and watch us and carry on a conversation while we worked. No problem. We were a little bit we were a little bit used to that with the kind of clientele that we served. So we're outside painting the house, and this older gentleman came out, and he literally ended every sentence with the word

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hello with a question mark on it. So the conversation would go something like this. Well, what color are

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you gonna use on the trim? Hello? Well, we're gonna use yellow.

Jeff Iorg:

Oh, you know, I like yellow. Hello? We know your wife picked it out. Yeah. She's, really good with colors.

Jeff Iorg:

Hello? He literally ended every sentence with the verbal tic, hello? Hello? Hello? It became really challenging to carry on those conversations.

Jeff Iorg:

Quite frankly, we started counting the hellos, and they become it became more important to keep up with the number than it did to have the conversation. Now that's a kind of

Jeff Iorg:

a humorous one because it was really in a harmless context, us painting a house and an old fellow just out there carrying on a conversation. But when you have an irate church member or a frustrated person in your workplace or you have a family member that has a verbal tic where they say the same word over and over or something like that, it can become a distraction that keeps you from being able to listen to them very effectively. And then another kind of distraction that really you have to fight off are what I call external distractions. Now, these are things that catch your attention and divert you from the person that you're trying to listen to. I'll just give you one example of how I've worked on this.

Jeff Iorg:

Many restaurants today have televisions in them, especially fast food restaurants or casual dining restaurants and of course, my favorite, barbecue joints. And so when I go to one of these with my wife, what's the temptation? The temptation is to watch the game or to watch the show or to be distracted by what's on the screen. And so when we go into one of these places, unless we're specifically going there to watch the game with a group or something like that, I will always try to choose a table with a seat with my back to the screens. Because I know that if I can eliminate that distraction, I'll be a better listener, that I'll be more focused on Anne and what she's saying and in the conversation we're gonna

Jeff Iorg:

have over the meal,

Jeff Iorg:

eliminating external distractions. So a second practice, the first one, focus some energy. The second one, fight off distractions. Third. A third step to becoming a better listener is to control your emotions

Jeff Iorg:

while you're listening. The one I have to control the most is impatience.

Jeff Iorg:

Yes. I actually said this before to my wife. I once said to her while she was in the middle of one of her stories that she was trying to explain something to me. I said, can you just tell me what time it is or do I have to listen to the whole story of how you built the clock? Yeah.

Jeff Iorg:

I really said that out loud. I know. I know. Some of you just probably said, that's it for me and you're gonna turn the podcast off and never listen to another thing because how can anyone be that insensitive to their wife? I'm telling you people, I needed to learn a lot about how to be a

Jeff Iorg:

better listener, and my impatience got the best of me that day. I said, don't tell me what can you just tell me what time it is? Don't bill me the clock.

Jeff Iorg:

That impatience produced a pretty sad experience that day. That's all I'll say about that.

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When you're impatient, are you frustrated, are you angry? It's hard to control your emotions.

Jeff Iorg:

I remember another situation in ministry where a woman came to me and told me about the abuse that she was experiencing with her husband. It was it was a verbal and emotional abuse and also just the neglect of him having other relationships with other women and all of that. And she poured her whole story out to me, and it was it was a devastating and brokenhearted experience to hear the story. I shared the gospel with her, started doing ministry with her, and then she asked me if I would speak to her husband. And so I said I would I would try to do that or I

Jeff Iorg:

would I would attempt to do that, so I did. And when I went to talk

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to him, I said, you know, your wife talked with me. These are some things she shared. I'd like talk with you about them and, you know, hear your perspective and then talk about if we can find a way forward. And he just started ranting and going on and justifying and all of this, and I'm just getting more and more angry while he's talking. I'm getting angry about his insensitivity.

Jeff Iorg:

I'm getting angry about his immorality. I'm getting angry about his selfishness. I'm getting angry about his insensitivity to his wife who was just completely broken. And I realized that my anger was getting the best of me and I wasn't even hearing him because I was so distracted by my anger. So part of active listening, of really dialing in and hearing what people are saying to you, is getting control of your emotions, setting aside impatience, setting aside frustration, setting aside anger, and really working hard to hear what's being said in the moment.

Jeff Iorg:

Number four,

Jeff Iorg:

learn the power of nonverbal communication. Now, there's a lot written about this and a lot that's out there, and quite frankly, some of it's just sort of like pop science. I get that. But there's some serious work that's been done on the importance of body language and nonverbal communication. Depending on the source you're reading and the kind of study that was done, you'll see numbers between 8095% of all communication, interpersonal communication, is nonverbal.

Jeff Iorg:

It's how a person, looks while they're talking to you. It's the shape of their eyes. It's the dilation of their pupils. It's the it's the quivering of their chin. It's how they hold their head.

Jeff Iorg:

It's how they slouch in the chair. It's whether they cross their arms in front of them or not. These are all things that you can pay attention to as you're having conversation. And frankly, most of these things we know a good bit about because we've been enculturated in them growing up, and we kind of have a sense of what these kinds of things mean, but we've never really stopped perhaps to think about what they mean. So learn to read and interpret nonverbal communication, and learn to structure your nonverbal communication back to the other person so that you're able to focus on them and indicate you're doing that by how you look at them and how you sit and how you face forward and how you hold yourself in the conversation.

Jeff Iorg:

So a fourth part of becoming an active listener is to understand the power of nonverbal communication, learn to see it and experience it when it's being given to you, and then to give it back in ways that facilitate and and really accelerate the communication in an interpersonal experience. And then finally, the last step to becoming an active listener is learn the art of asking good questions rather than telling people so much about what you wanna say. Learn to ask good questions. Learn to ask open ended questions, not yes or no questions, but tell me why you think you did that, or what did you feel when that was happening, Or why do you think God wants you to go that direction? Open ended questions to help people to give more information, to think more clearly or more broadly about the subject at hand, but to give them open ended questions to bring out more understanding of what you're what they're trying

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to communicate and what you're trying to learn.

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I know that as an evaluative listener, I'm mostly thinking about what I wanna say back to the person. But as an active listener, I'm hearing what they're saying, and I'm thinking, what can I ask that will bring out more information? What can I ask that will shape the conversation in a healthier direction? What can I ask that will get this person thinking about some new options that we may be able to explore in this conversation? Asking open ended questions.

Jeff Iorg:

Now sometimes when you do this, you're asking for even more wandering explanations and even more emotionally laden answers. And so you can only ask these kinds of questions effectively if you're doing the first four things, focusing your energy, fighting off distractions, controlling your emotions, and paying attention to nonverbals. If you're doing those things and then you're asking these open ended questions, you're you're actually facilitating even greater communication. You can also ask probing questions, allowing the pain of the probing moment to help sharpen a person's awareness and help them to speak more specifically about what you're saying. I know, for example, that in, some basic training that I had in pastoral counseling class and in, field education in a hospital context, I I know that I noticed that I had a problem and that I would ask a probing question and then I wouldn't wait very long for the response because I wanted to alleviate the tension of the moment.

Jeff Iorg:

And my mentor, my person training me said, listen, that tension is exactly what you're wanting. Don't rescue the person. Give them a moment to think about what you've asked and let them answer on their own terms. Man, that was really helpful for me because I found myself rushing again to try to say something for them rather than really listening to what they had to say back to me. Well, I started this podcast with a confession.

Jeff Iorg:

Developing listening skills has been a lifelong process for me. I still do not consider myself a good listener. It is a work in progress. But through some detailed study, lots of practice, and patience by people who care about me, I've moved from being a marginal listener, from being an evaluative listener, to at least on my good days, being an active listener, where I put into practice focusing my energy, fighting off distractions, controlling my emotions, paying attention to nonverbals, and asking good questions. And by doing those things, I have become a much better listener.

Jeff Iorg:

If you struggle with this same challenge, put these practices into your life, become a better listener. It'll help you as you lead on.