9 Tips to Improve Your Listening Skills

In the fantastic book “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful“, Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter identify 21 bad habits that stop people to move ahead in their organizations. Out of the 21 habits they give 2 of them exclusive chapters, one of them is to improve Listening.

At the end of the “Listening” chapter Goldsmith and Reiter give us nine tips to improve our listening.

Quoted from the book, the clues are:

1. Listen.  

2. Don’t interrupt.

3. Don’t finish other people’s sentences.

4. Don’t say “I knew that”.

5. Don’t even agree with the other person (even if he praises you, just say “Thank you”).

6. Don’t use the words “no”, “but”, and “however”.

7. Don’t be distracted. Don’t let your eyes or attention wander elsewhere while the other person is talking.

8. Mantain your end of the dialogue by asking intelligent questions that (a) show you’re paying attention, (b)move the conversation forward, and (c) require the other person to talk (while you listen).

9. Eliminate any striving to impress the other person with how smart or funny you are. Your only aim is to let the other person feel that he or she is accomplishing that.

As you can see, these are very “easy” to understand tips to improve our listening skills. Although, easy to understand they’re not so easy to practice. We have to let our egos move away in order to give other people’s the chance to be important. I would resume all this nine tips as stay focus on the other person, he / she is the important one and you are there to make him / her feel like that.

LEADERSHIP ACTIONS

1. Go on and pick only 2 of the tips and work on them for two days.
2. After those first two days, ask yourself. Do I really understand better the other person’s messages I’m sure you do, if you did practice the clues mindfully. If you don’t try again…
3. Keep going back to the list and pick another tip.
4. The most important part of the action is to continually review if you’re improving.

Remember, Be Alert, Be A Leader :)

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