Description

This clear and practical guide will give you all you need to start enhancing your listening skills and improving not just your understanding, but relationships as well.

The need for effective listening has never been greater. Pace of life, obsession with outcomes, and genuine concern for our own interests and performance all conspire to degrade our ability to listen properly.

Perhaps you have to listen well as part of your job, you want to give full attention to your children and loved ones, or maybe you simply want to do better in life. This guide will help you do all of these things and more.

If you want to be able to encourage and support others towards positive change then the first thing that needs to happen is to build a safe and non-threatening platform from which to do it. That means listing first in order to fully understand and acknowledge the other person.

However well-intentioned you are, without the right precautions even the most well-intended conversation can sound threatening if it is delivered the wrong way. This can produce hostility and defensiveness rather than equality of voice and receptiveness.

This six-page LifeHack Guide includes:

• Listening attitude is the route to success
• How to avoid the pitfalls that hinder many conversations
• The ‘three big’ reasons that we find it difficult to listen attentively
• A personal skills inventory for self-assessment
• What makes a good listener
• Seven point framework for effective listening
• Reading list; titles to help you continue your study.

Listening is an underrated skill. It is the most important aspect of effective communication and ‘First seek to understand’ is a sound guiding principle.

Good listening is a dynamic and unfolding process. It builds rapport which helps the speaker to clarify their thinking, as well as enabling the listener to understand.

Perhaps you have to listen well as part of your job, or you want to give full attention to your children and loved ones, or maybe you simply want to do better in life. This guide will help you do all of these things and more.

Make your communications work better with the tips and exercises in this LifeHack.