Essentially, there are two key components to it. One is non-verbal communications, which silently indicate you are listening to clients and staying in the moment. These cues include sitting forward, making eye contact, nodding or exhibiting facial expressions that convey your engagement. Verbal cues, meanwhile, encourage the person to keep talking.
Here are a list of some active listening techniques, (taken from The Counseling Dictionary by Samuel T. Gladding and Effective Helping: Interviewing and Counseling Techniques by Barbara Okun and Ricki Kantrowitz).
“Minimal encouragers.” These are small signals that show you are listening and following what the client is saying.
Pacing. “Pacing” means matching or mirroring the client’s behavior. You can pace their tone, rate, volume or content.
Probing. This means continuing to talk to the client in an open-ended attempt to obtain more information from them about something.
Paraphrasing or restating. Advisors must sometimes restate what the client has said, but in a different way—with different words, nonjudgmentally. They use their own words to tell the clients what they heard.
Reflecting. This means communicating back to the clients what you believe they said. You can either reflect back their feelings (expressing in your words the ways they feel, whether it is stated or strongly implied) or you can reflect back to them their content (repeating in fewer and fewer words their essential ideas).
Clarifying. This means you attempt to focus on or understand the content or intent of a client’s statement and at the same time help him or her better comprehend what was said.
Reframing. A process in which you can help change the clients’ perceptions by explaining a situation in a different, usually positive context. For example, suppose you go into a grocery store and see two rows of bologna. One is marked, “90% fat free” and the other is marked, “10% fat.” While they are the same fat content, most people choose the 90% fat free, because it sound healthier. The way a question is framed, changes the outcome.
Parroting. This means repeating word for word what the client has said. While this can be effective, be careful, because it can clearly be annoying as well.
Validation. Validation is an attempt to let the clients know that you can accept and are empathetic with what they have expressed, by agreeing with them or finding something they have said that you agree with.
Summarizing. This means synthesizing what the client has communicated and focusing a series of scattered ideas into a clear idea or perspective.
An advanced pacing skill allows you to see how your clients learn, either by listening, seeing or doing. They often give cues by the way they phrase sentences. For example, an auditory learner may say, “I hear you,” while a visual learner may say, “I see what you are saying.” A kinesthetic, or tactile, learner may say, “I feel” or “I sense.” Once you understand your clients’ learning style preference, you can use phrasing that they can relate to and present new information in a way they are most comfortable with. This works very well when presenting a plan. Because our planning software (MoneyGuidePro) is collaborative and interactive, we can deliver our plans by going through charts and pictures or allowing clients to make changes themselves using the “Playzone,” depending on their learning style.
I’m sure you agree that if you engage clients in meaningful conversations, it will go a long way to growing and improving your trusting relationships with them. But it’s also clear to me that unless we are also demonstrating trusting behaviors and conducting our businesses in an ethical manner, it still adds up to a failure to communicate.
Deena Katz is associate professor in the personal financial planning department at Texas Tech University, a partner in Evensky & Katz in Coral Gables, Fla., and the author of several books on planning and practice
management.