When was the last time you listened to your surroundings? What does the world sound like when you open your window in the morning? If you want to run your business from a place of purpose, listening is an essential starting point.
What does it mean to Listen?
Listening means opening your mind and ears to the sounds and environment around you without judgment or getting caught up in how you respond. You might know this from conversational guides or networking tips – in that context, specialists recommend listening to your conversational partner’s story instead of thinking of what to say next to keep the conversation going.
Listening in its purest sense is the same. When you listen, you are simply looking to receive information – no judgment, no analysis.
Listening and Purpose
If you want to define your purpose, you need to start with listening. This can be both literal and metaphorical. There are two areas that you should listen to: 1) Internal, and 2) External
1) Internal
- What are your biggest achievements so far?
- What are the biggest lessons you’ve learned?
- How did you get to your achievements and lessons learned?
- How are you feeling about your current business activities?
- When (in your business) do you feel excited? When do you not?
- What is working well? What needs to be improved?
2) External
- How does your team perceive your business? What motivates them?
- Why do customers come to you? What keeps them engaged?
- When is it easy for you to make money?
- When it’s difficult to get revenue and profit, why is that?
- How do others talk about your business?
These questions are a small selection of the areas you can explore when defining your purpose.
Receiving Inputs
It can be extremely difficult to listen without immediately responding. Naturally, you will hear something that might strike you as negative, and you’ll want to jump up and react. That might be appropriate in a business crisis but not when exploring your purpose.
Listening takes practice. There are several ways you can improve your listening skills.
- Listen to music (yes, quite obvious and yet we don’t do it often) – don’t do anything else and listen to a piece of music for 3-5 minutes. No driving, walking, or doing the laundry. Try to hear as many instruments, nuances, and sounds as possible.
- Walk without your headphones – take a walk in nature or the city without headphones and take in the sounds around you
Listening requires you to be present. That’s a difficult skill to master but there are some ways in which we can trick our brains when it comes to defining your business purpose:
- Writing – Doing a guided, free-flowing writing exercise is a great way to articulate your inputs without judgment.
- Association Games – modeled on theater improvisation exercises, you can play a game with your team: pick a topic and shout out words that come to mind.
Business Application
In our work, listening is the first step we take with clients. In the marketing context, many would call this an audit. While there are many elements of this type of listening that result in an audit, there is one crucial area that many audits often don’t take into account – Emotion.
If you want to turn your purpose into profit, how you, your team, and your customers feel are crucial insights you need to uncover. Even though we might pretend to be cool, detached, analytical business owners, we are emotional humans. If you don’t feel excited about your purpose, you’re not going to be consistent in acting on it. If your team doesn’t feel inspired, it will be much easier for them to drop the ball. If your customers don’t connect with your purpose, they most likely won’t come back.
Listening will inevitably uncover emotions that can be important signposts to your business purposes. Only after we listened, do we get to define your purpose.