Listen Beyond the Words, Then Check What You Heard

Listening includes more than vocabulary

Pace, hesitation, gesture and energy can tell me that a topic matters before I understand exactly why. A colleague may say that a dependency is fine while their delivery suggests that the answer needs another question.

The danger is to treat my interpretation as fact. Non verbal information can create a useful hypothesis, but culture, personality, disability and context all affect how people communicate. The responsible next move is curiosity and checking.

An improv exercise can separate these two skills: noticing more and claiming less certainty about what the signals mean.

Listen broadly enough to notice the signal, then check carefully enough not to invent the meaning.

The exercise and its source

Gibberish Games appears in Yes, And by Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton, with the exercise indexed at print pages 206 and 207. Two participants communicate with invented sounds while a third person interprets the exchange for observers.

The book presents the practice as listening to the whole person rather than words alone. I add an explicit checking round because workplace interpretation carries consequences.

Practiced Spontaneity: Resources, Theory and Supplemental Information by Izzy Gesell describes presence, connection and acknowledgement as parts of full body listening. These ideas support the shift from watching for entertainment toward watching to understand.

What the exercise makes visible

A translator may chase jokes, create a private story or rely only on volume. When asked to slow down, they begin to notice repeated sounds, changes in distance, posture and the way one speaker responds to another.

The speakers also learn something. If their intention is not reaching the translator, they can change pace, gesture or relationship without returning to real words.

This creates shared responsibility. Communication is not a test that the listener alone must pass. Speaker and listener adapt until enough meaning is shared.

A practical workplace application

After the exercise, I ask participants to think about an international meeting or an expert discussion where they understood the words but were uncertain about the intention.

A useful response might be, ‘I hear that the date is still possible, and I also sense some hesitation. Which condition are you least certain about?’ The speaker can confirm, correct or reject the interpretation.

This is especially valuable across business and technology. A word such as ready, accepted or minor may hide very different thresholds. Listening beyond the word should lead to a better question, not a confident guess.