You know that feeling you get when you’ve listened to a fantastic podcast and your brain lights up like a Christmas tree?

The feeling when out of nowhere you start to tingle and the world seems more connected than it ever has before.

What if you had a superpower that all but guaranteed you’d have that experience each time you clicked play?

Well, it may not be a superpower, but active listening skills are for podcasts what speed reading skills are for books. A chance to spend the same amount of time as anyone else on a project but pull out heaps more value out of the experience.

And while active listening is often thought of as a bi-lateral communication technique, you can apply those same principles to our podcast listening to step up your game.

Flexing the active listening muscle is the difference between knowing something you heard and understanding something you heard.

Memorization vs. Understanding

For an illustration of what we’re talking about, you need to go back to grade school. When it came time for an exam, there was at least one genius who figured it would be easier to memorize the answers and regurgitate them to secure high marks.

Until the teacher randomized the order of the test questions and then all of a sudden Denver was the capital of Wisconsin.

Our friend could think about the difference between rote memorization and actually engaging with the material during detention while the rest of us were out applying our newly useful geography skills.

The point is that active listening requires a bit of invested effort on the front end. But the return on that investment is multiples higher than absorbing the material on a surface level.

When it comes to podcasts, an hour-long show could net several actionable ideas that make a tangible difference in your life. But in order to reveal the gold in a pan full of mud, you have to take an active approach. You’ve got to agitate the material.

Listen Generously

On a recent episode of the Tim Ferris show, writer Michael Lewis described the process improv comedians use when engaging with the audience as listening generously. No matter what the audience shouts as a suggestion, there’s some useful seed that can germinate and grow into a bit right there on the stage.

This tactic seems simple once you’ve heard it, but we can completely miss the chance to listen generously if we’re not being mindful. The comedian can’t go into the audience searching for an answer they want… part of the magic is in the audience connection. That’s the game.

The idea behind listening generously is to listen in a way that you know you’re going to take something away from what the speaker is saying.

It may not be what you thought you were going to take away, but if you listen with an open mind, it’s difficult to not learn something new. So listen generously and with a sincere sense of curiosity.

Write it Down

Stop the show and write down, in real-time, any thoughts, reactions, or interesting quotes you hear on the show. Things that make you say “huh…” out loud. You want to take the time, pause the conversation, and reduce what’s cooking in your head to physical form.

You can do this in a note-taking app on your phone if you’re in a pinch, but the secret sauce is in doing it the old fashioned way. Put a pen to paper.

The physical act of writing down what was said on the podcast activates the encoding circuit in the hippocampus. So you can leverage what’s known as the “generation effect.”

The neuroscience sounds like mysticism, but the basic idea is that the physical act of writing forces your brain to interpret what it’s heard in a new, active manner. So you end up remembering what you generated, not necessarily what you actually heard.

Say It Loud, Say it Proud

This one is especially fun to do while you’re by yourself or while commuting on a crowded subway (will we ever do such a thing again?) because it makes you look crazy. But another way to practice active listening and to spur on that generation effect is to say what you’ve heard out loud.

In a normal conversation, saying what you heard someone say back to them demonstrates that you’re listening and trying to understand what they are trying to get across.

In this context, it doesn’t look crazy at all.

But just because you’re having a one-sided conversation in a very public place doesn’t mean the neuroscience isn’t any less solid on the matter. 

Idea Cross-Pollination

You know what else helps deepen your understanding of a subject as opposed to merely memorizing a fact?

By applying that subject. Adopt it into your brain’s ecosystem of working ideas. Put the idea you got from a podcast, wrote down, and said out loud in a cocktail shaker with some of your other ideas. Give it a good whirl and see what new idea cocktail comes out.

Will it be delicious and have the perfect hint of intoxication with no hangover? Who knows? But you’ll know the recipe and can start isolating the ingredients.

James Altucher calls this process “idea sex.” Crass? Perhaps, but it is an apt description of what’s going on. It’s difficult to understand an idea until you’re able to engage with it and see how it fits in with your other ideas.

This is another technique from active listening you’d be doing in the course of normal conversation. It goes back to at least Socrates when he would engage anyone in conversation. He would listen to their ideas, and apply those ideas to ideas he had already to see what came out.

He called it the elenchus and it’s been divining truth ever since. There’s no reason you can’t be on both sides of the conversation.

Conclusion

Podcasts really are a remarkable medium. Evidenced alone by their booming popularity on both the production and consumption side of the curve.

But with so many podcasts now vying for our time and attention, it’s more important than ever that the time we invest is invested wisely. By using active listening techniques as described above we can ensure that we make the most out of each download.

Hey, every plate appearance might not be a home run, but sometimes all you need is to put the ball in play. Active listening gives all of us that opportunity. 

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