Saturday, June 1, 2013

Active Listening Skills


Active Listening Skills
Listening is not a skills we are necessarily “born with”, but it is certainly a critical skill for building and maintaining relation-ships. Think how much you appreciate the feeling you get when you believe that someone has actually heard and under-stood your point of view. You feel that they might be a “kindred spirit”. You want to spend time with people like that. Although good communication always re-quires mutual respect and desire to send clear messages, much miscommunication could be avoided through better listening skills.
Listening is not the same as hearing, al-though hearing is a necessary first step in “getting the message”.
Real listening is based on the intention to do one of four things:
  1. Understand someone
  2. Enjoy someone
  3. Learn something
  4. Give help or solace
...Unfortunately, a lot of pseudo-listening masquerades as the real thing. The intention is not to listen, but to meet some other need. Some of the typical needs met by pseudo-listening are:
  1. Making people think you’re interested so they will like you
  2. Being alert to see if you are in danger of getting rejected
  3. Listening for one specific piece of information and ignoring everything else
  4. Buying time to prepare your next comment
  5. Half-listening so someone will listen to you
  6. Listening to find someone’s vulnerabilities or to take advantage
  7. Looking for the weak points in an argument so you can always be right, listening to get ammunition for attack
  8. Checking to see how people are reacting, making sure you pro-duce the desired effect
  9. Half-listening because a good, kind, or nice person would
  10. Half-listening because you don’t know how to get away without hurting or offending someone

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