Finding Your Engagement Style: Listening

Writing is incredibly difficult to sustain—that’s why there are far less professional writers in the world and far more of the rest of us. But the rest of us do have to write from time to time, perhaps even fairly often if we’re trying to produce regular new web content. So in order to provide you with some strategies for keeping the ideas flowing, I’m focusing this and a few other posts on engagement styles. Your engagement style is the way you are best suited to engage with ideas—and it may not be writing. Besides writing, there are at least three other styles: talking, listening and visual thinking. I covered talking last week. This time, listening:

Listeners do well in dialogues, being able to bounce ideas back and forth and shape them through conversation with others. For a listener, the idea of solitary writing is probably such a challenge that any potential for working through ideas is stifled at the get-go by the presence of an empty page rather than a living, thinking partner.

Like talkers, listeners might do well to start with what comes naturally—create an opportunity to have a conversation, and record it, either with video or audio. The recording itself may be good enough to post, but you could also transcribe it, giving you the opportunity to edit out the parts of the discussion that are less germane to your core topic or enhance it by linking to other content that may be referenced by you or your conversation partners.

By the way, I saw a great example of this done recently by Portigal Consulting at Core77.