{"id":4301,"date":"2014-01-30T16:36:04","date_gmt":"2014-01-31T00:36:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/3.209.169.194\/blogs\/paul\/?p=4301"},"modified":"2017-04-13T09:54:41","modified_gmt":"2017-04-13T16:54:41","slug":"learning-listen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/learning-listen\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning to listen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fellow MVP Chris Shaw (b<\/a> | t<\/a>) wrote a blog post earlier this week<\/a> on learning from mistakes and tagged me to write a similar post – so here it is.<\/p>\n

Let me start with a story first. Back in April 1999 I was working for Microsoft on the SQL team as a developer in the Storage Engine team. I’d just joined a few months earlier after spending 5 years at DEC and certainly wasn’t a rookie developer, but I was new at Microsoft. I was writing the DBCC INDEXDEFRAG<\/em> code and upgrading DBCC SHOWCONTIG<\/em> (and merging in the functionality of the old, undocumented TVF fn_indexinfo<\/em>), and I was pretty excited by it (and I still am – defrag\/reorg is cool :-).<\/p>\n

I was so excited that after I’d had the code for one major part of the project code reviewed by a fellow dev, I checked it in. I remember standing in the corridor outside my office talking with that dev and a tester, when our boss comes along and the conversation turns to my project and I said something like ‘Yup, I just checked in the next part’. My boss’s face started to turn pink and he said ‘ come into my office…’<\/p>\n

I then got bawled out because I wasn’t supposed to check in before the boss had reviewed the code it too. I messed up because I hadn’t been listening properly in our team meeting where code review policies had been explained. It wasn’t a nice experience and it was entirely my fault. I decided to start listening. Really listening.<\/p>\n

Listening is a critical skill in life – both at work (interacting with clients and colleagues\/friends) and at home (interacting with family and friends) – and in my opinion is the most important of the various communication skills (I talk about this and a lot more in my Pluralsight course Communications: How to Talk, Write, Present, and Get Ahead<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

As much as possible I like to use what’s called ‘active listening’, where you’re making a conscious effort to focus on what is being said. This involves doing the following:<\/p>\n