Honing Your Listening Skills Like a Katana
Leaders must develop their ability to pay attention. This requires an enhanced level of listening skills. As a leader, are you able to listen to another person at multiple levels at the same time?
Adopt these 10 strategies and you will hone your skills to katana-sharpness.
1. Focus on the speaker's deeper meaning, not just the surface words. What is the speaker's basic motivation in the moment: persuasion, transfer of information, approval?
2. Focus on content, not delivery. Concentrate speaker is saying and do not be unduly affected by her way of stating it.
3. Don't assume you know what the speaker is going to say. Reject prejudging a message, so you can hear all of it without filtering.
4. It is very easy to tune out so listen for common ground. What do you agree with? What is problematic? Search for brand-new concepts or understandings that could be useful to you.
5. Take notes, even if brief. This will improve your retention of key points.
6. Resist distractions and interruptions. Outside distractions are incidents you can listen to or see, or which might be influencing your ability to hear. Interior distractions take place when your mind wanders into unconnected memories or moves to assumptions or strategies.
7. Use the speed of your mind. You think 5 times faster than she can speak. Actively collate, infer, evaluate, and connect what you are being told. Do not allow musings unconnected to the discussion.
8. Listen to the speaker's emotions and feelings and label them silently. Every person understands that intelligence is a servant to feelings. When you listen to emotions, you are listening to the real human being, not an artificial, nonauthenticatic person.
9. Bend your mind. You can avoid complex topics, or you can intellectually face Byzantine information to force you learn and grow.
10. Love listening! Take to heart the these recommendations. Empathize with the speaker's discomforts to enhance your understanding, whether or not you agree.
