Activate Your Active Listening Activity | Insurance Agency Playbook

Are you truly listening or just hearing?👂

Welcome back to another episode with the listening guru Craig Pretzinger! On today's episode Craig talks teaches the techniques to master the powerful art of listening actively.

Did you know that people usually retain only around 25% of what they hear? The other 75% of the information just goes out the other ear!

Tune in to learn how you can master this art to help your agency with sales, conflict resolution, and overall client relationships.

🗝 Join in to learn about the key elements of listening actively and how non-verbal communication fits into the conversation and don't miss out on how just through actively listening and altering your body language, you can become a better leader!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey there. Do you want to know the secret weapon to building unbreakable client relationships and business and insurance? Stay tuned. Insurance dudes are on a mission to escape being handcuffed by our agencies. How? By uncovering the secrets to creating a predictable, consistent and profitable agency sales machine. I am Craig Prutzinger, I am Jason Feldman. We are agents, we are insurance dudes. All right, we're back. This is Craig, the listening guru of Pretzinger. Welcome back. We are glad to have you here. Insurance dudes and dudettes. Today we're diving into a skill that can revolutionize your client relationships and transform your agency's success, and maybe something that you could even use at home. That's right. We're talking about active listening.

Speaker 1: 0:52

This one is a hard one, especially for us sales folks. Right, we like to gab. I know what you're thinking. Listening it's easy. I do it all day long, every day.

Speaker 1: 1:01

But here's the thing there's a big difference between hearing and truly listening. So, in fact, there's been all these studies done that the average person only listens to about 25% of what they actually can do. That means 75% of what's being said is going in one ear and out the other. Now, if you're watching on YouTube, you just saw it go in one ear and out the other, you know, go figure. So what if I told you that by mastering the art of active listening, you could not only improve your client relationships, but also increase your sales, resolve conflicts more effectively and maybe even become a better leader?

Speaker 1: 1:42

So first, it starts with understanding what active listening really is. It's not just nodding along while somebody talks, or waiting for your turn to speak and thinking about what you're going to say. It's about being fully present in the conversation, focusing on understanding the other person's perspective and then responding with empathy and with clarity. Okay, so one of the key elements of this active listening is the nonverbal communication. So this includes things like maintaining eye contact, using open body language and even mirroring the other person's posture or facial expression. So if they're nodding, right, you're nodding along. By doing these things, you're sending a powerful message, and it's in the physiology of our body. I'm here with you. I'm invested in this conversation. You have my full attention. Think about what it's like when you're talking to somebody and they're looking at their phone and they're like uh-huh, uh-huh, right, terrible. So put yourself in the other role and watch what happens. So put yourself in the other role and watch what happens.

Speaker 1: 2:45

Another critical component of the whole thing is reflecting back on what you've heard. So this means paraphrasing the other person's words and checking for understanding about a claim because it was denied, instead of immediately jumping into the problem-solving, defensive, passing the buck thing. You might say something like what I'm hearing is that you're frustrated because you feel like your claim should have been covered. Is that right? So you're getting clarification and it's showing that you're listening right. By reflecting that back, it's really double checking. You're verifying that what you heard was correct and you're validating them. You're validating that they're upset. You're validating their feelings without trying to be defensive. This creates a sense of trust. So, instead of turning into this boom, boom, boom head-butting, we're actually creating a sense of trust and some rapport that is going to actually strengthen the relationship. So what it does is it flips a script on it.

Speaker 1: 3:51

But active listening isn't just about building relationships. It's also a powerful tool for resolving conflicts and finding solutions too. So when tensions are high and emotions take control, the limbic system is just going nuts, right, because it's taken over. It's easy to get caught up in the heat of the moment and then we start arguing, we start defending our position. Now, a really important thing, before we even get there is to notice, right, if we notice that we're starting to escalate like that, really good time to eject, because it's going to get to the point where you can't control it. But also practicing active listening can help diffuse it. So if you get into the situation where now the emotions are running wild, all you can do is control yourself, which is difficult, especially in the heightened emotion state. So you've got to give yourself that break, but at the same time stopping being fully present, realizing okay, I am pissed right now and I'm just going to listen because I'm not going to say something good and you can avoid a lot of potential consequences from that.

Speaker 1: 5:04

The key is to focus on understanding. Remember, you're both upset. If you're both upset and you disagree on it, it's okay. You don't have to have the same opinion, you don't have to believe the same things, but it is important to try to understand and that will diffuse it, right? If you seek to understand, hey look, I'm not trying to say that what you're saying is right or wrong. That's not my intention. My intention is to understand and if we come across that way, maybe that perspective will shift the way that you're looking at it. I've seen that happen many times to myself.

Speaker 1: 5:37

We can also turn this layup. It's great. So here's the best part Active listening is a skill anyone can learn and you can improve with practice. We're talking about practice, so it's not just some magic thing that some people have and some people don't. It is practice, just like everything else, right, consistency. So how can we start developing it? How can you actually start doing this today? And you can guess what.

Speaker 1: 6:04

You've noticed I'm loving worksheets lately, and so here's another one. We got the active listening playbook. We're going to throw that in there and go down below. Like I said, as you're passing, as you're just about to pass the subscribe button, you click it and you go doink and you bounce right off of it over to the link that says active listening playbook or of some name is similar to that, which you could use some common sense and figure it out. It'll be the first link in there. So we appreciate you listening. Mr Jason will be back, I believe, on the next one, but this is kind of fun too. I like to speak at it. Keep it, keep it real. Talk to you later. Bye.