Listening Skills for Boosting Communication
Without understanding the world becomes a chaotic place. There is wasted time, money and resources and added frustration. The good news is we can do something about it. One of the most effective tools we can use to gain understanding is to improve our ability to listen.
What You’ll Learn
Barriers to Listening / Listening Skills Self-Assessment / Listening Skills Scoring / Levels of Listening / Listening Principles / What You See Is What You Get - Positive Body Language, Negative Body Language and Signals / Lend Me Your Ear: Seven Types of Listeners / The Innerview
Why You Want To Learn It
A typical adult speaks at 100–150 words per minute, depending on the language and the style of the speaker. We can actually hear and understand at a rate of 200 words per minute or more. So when we are listening, there is a fair amount of excess capacity between our ears and our brains. Attentive listening is far more challenging, more demanding, and more difficult than speaking. The art of being a good listener takes focus, patience, and a sincere desire to really communicate with others. While listening is only one side of a conversation, it is usually the neglected side. The first step to overcome this is to recognize that effective listening is an active process. An accurate assessment will usually reveal that people often pretend to listen, or listen just long enough to identify how we are going to respond. People also fail to recognize the filters that impact their ability to fully comprehend other perspectives and points of view. Overcoming these filters helps create open, constructive communication.
How It Will Help You
At the completion of this module, you will be able to: Assess listening skills and work to overcome listening filters. / Apply effective approaches to deal with different types of listeners. / Engage others by asking factual, causative, and value-based questions.
