emendatio

Ever wondered what’s the most important skill in your daily business is, no matter whether you’re a construction worker, a lawyer or a sales guy like me: its listening! Listening to your customers, your colleagues, your boss and even your belly. Now you might say that these are different kinds of listening skills, but I dare to say they are not. Listening is so very important as it maximizes effectiveness of aural business communication, no matter who you’re talking, err listening to.

Why is listening so vitally important for good communication? Because we think at a much faster rate than we listen. Which means that although we might listen to someone talking to us, our mind is working on the words it is processing on a much faster rate. Our brain will take whatever word it hears and construct new words, ideas and thoughts around this. Very often we tend to literally get lost inside this process and stop listening and following the conversation. Therefore listening is not only about asking the right questions, but more importantly about stopping yourself from “thinking too fast” and forcing yourself to focus on the conversation.

The best way to stop yourself from dwelling away is practicing it. Whenever you are in a conversation and you notice that your thoughts are drifting, force yourself to stop. You can only think about one thing at the same moment, therefore you have to focus. The lifecoaches blog suggest the following little exercise to train this ability:

Take a moment and think about where you would like to go on your next vacation. What would you like to do? How much fun would you have? Okay, so you got the dream vacation? Now, what do you have to accomplish at work or home tomorrow? What did you notice took place when you went from thinking about your dream vacation to work or home? What happened in your mind? Did you switch gears from vacation to work? You were so focused on creating that dream vacation and then you easily began focusing on work or home. This exercise is what we must practice when having conversations with people. It will help us to stay focused on what the individual is saying.

This will be the first and most important skill for improving your listening skills. Force yourself to focus on what’s being said, focus on not letting your mind drift away. In a next step you should fine-tune your listening skills, here are a few methods how to do it:

1. Learn to “listen ahead”: By “listening ahead”, trying to anticipate where a discussion is leading to, during the dialogue, determining the conclusion in advance of your required response allows you to relax and improve information absorption. This might sound contrary to what I’ve said above, but it means that your mind should focus on the conversation, not on anything else.
2. Learn to periodically validate communicated information: By mentally striving to validate the accuracy and completeness of information points made by the prospect, especially during pauses in the dialogue, (which can be achieved with note taking), you can allow yourself to absorb more information easier, especially information forthcoming in the continued dialogue.
3. Utilize “Active Listening” techniques: By periodically, mentally summarizing the major points communicated by the prospect and voicing, reaffirming your interpretation of the points made back to the prospect you add a tremendous amount of clarity to the information exchanged thus far.
Strive to understand versus “Judging”: By working to consciously understand what the prospect is saying versus the natural tendency of judging - approving or disapproving what is said will allow you to absorb what is actually said more than any other listening development technique.
4. Use your eyes to “get the rest of the story”: By listening with your eyes, paying attention to the prospect’s body language, their nonverbal facial and body movements or hand gestures you can see what the whole body is trying to tell you, not just the mouth!
5. Maintain a mental repertoire of common responses: By mentally developing and rehearsing how you are going to strategically respond to common sales prospect purchase objections, for example, in advance of a sales call, allows you to listen more effectively. A comprehensive mental inventory of common responses will also give you more confidence in any selling situation.

Listening is the most effective way to build trust, establish a strong relationship, maximize your time by properly disqualifying dead end opportunities and protecting your own and your company’s resources. When you listen with interest, you encourage communication. This allows another person to open up to you. If they feel safe, they will trust you. Encourage communication by showing interest in what someone shares with you by nodding when they speak. You don’t have to agree. You’re just showing that you’re listening. Don’t interrupt when someone is speaking just so that you can have your turn.

Good listening skills are directly connected to good questioning skills. I will talk about them in one of the next posts here. Meanwhile I’d like to recommend googling for more information on listening skills, there are tons of stuff on the intertubes.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 11:28 am and is filed under Communication and Self-Improvement.