What is Effective Listening?

• Effective Listening Overview

• Effective listening is the ability to actively understand information provided by the speaker, and much more as well.

Empathetic Listening

• Empathetic Listening

• The highest form of listening we can obtain is being able to listen with empathy.

Staying Focused

• Staying Focused

• It may sound ridiculously simple, but often the reason we fail to reach an outcome is because our focus has wavered.

• Body Language and Presence

• When you’re mindful with your body language, you can maintain your own focus and maintain others’ focus on you.

• Non-Verbal Messages

• You need to be sensitive to the nonverbal message you’re sending with the shape, position, orientation and arrangement of your whole body and limbs.

• Don’t Fake It

• If you pretend to focus, what you’re focusing on is the pretending, not on the person you’re listening to.

• Show Your Mood

• Stay focused by staying open and transparent. Rather than fake interest, show your authentic mood.

• Breathe

• The quickest way to re-center yourself and maintain focus is with organised, rational breathing, or what’s known as the “square breath”.

• Repeat and Rephrase

• Another way to stay focused is to use the technique of repeating or rephrasing what we heard the other person say, before we speak.

The Great Question

• The Great Question

• To effectively listen, we need to be willing to stop talking, draw out the other person’s point of view, and really listen to what they have to say.

• Closed Questions

• Closed ended questions are designed to get very specific information from the other person.

• Open Questions

• Open questions are designed to draw out someone's opinions, feelings, and knowledge

• Probing and Clarifying

• Probing and clarifying questions are designed to give us more information on a topic we’ve already been discussing.

• Summary Questions

• Summary questions can be a great way to honestly check that you get what the other person is telling you.

Listening

• During Conference Calls

• On a conference call participants can’t see you, and you can’t see them. It can be very tempting to multi task.

• Over the Phone

• Over the phone, we can’t see or be seen, but listeners can hear when you loose focus.

• Over Telepresence

• This film looks at some challenges to overcome when it comes to listening over telepresence.

• Face to Face

• Here are some common sense listening tools that can be applied during face-to-face communication.

• Face to Face - Meetings

• The same common sense listening tools that can be applied to individual face-to-face communication, also apply to group face-to-face meetings.

Actions

• Actions

• Phil Daniels a professor of psychology is credited with devising a process called Start-Stop-Keep that asks some valuable questions.