In the fantastic book “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful
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:
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.
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 
Leadership
13 comments
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really, these points r very imp. 2 every1 for conservation & improving learning skills
simply fantastic…
Don’t you think paying much attention to the person(following those nine tips) who is not to the point is wasting our valuable time in today’s competitive environment.It is not a matter of losing patience.so we have to just impress others.
First of all, thanks to all the people that have made their comments in the blog. I’m really grateful for that.
The last comment I’ve received is from Tameemuddin, to address the concern that is showing us I will say:
I see your point. But, How can you tell if someone is wasting your time if you don’t pay attention?
If we find our time is really valuable, then we probably have a tight schedule, and we don’t have much time to have conversations other than scheduled meetings.
The thing is, if someone wants to have a talk with us, then we can schedule a 15 minute meeting with that person, and give them the chance to explain themselves.
The good thing about it is:
1. We don’t need to worry about losing time because we’ve saved time to talk with someone.
2. We have 15 minutes to work on our listening habit.
3. We have the chance to end up the talk exactly on time because that’s the time we have appointed to.
4. We will know what the person wanted to share with us.
On the other hand, if you suddenly find yourself in a conversation you think is getting you nowhere and you don’t want to be there, you have to have the guts to ask the permission to leave. That’s all. If you think you’re wasting your time talking to someone you don’t need to, then simply don’t do it. It’s that simple.
– Ken
thanks, basic but really usefull
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