Communication has always been a crucial factor which contribute high success rate not only in business but also in personal life. In this world where every one is trying their best to thrive and achieve excellence in their life – high stress is often one of its outcome. Due to which people devote very less time at listening to one another.
They often neglect the fact that it is effective listening that can boost their efficiency both at work and in personal life. Say, at work effective listening yields proper understanding of the assignments which results in to fewer mistakes, less wasted time and save money. In personal life, effective listening can save your relationships or marriage and helps you to live in harmony with your family.
As every problem brings some potential solutions with them, effective listening can help to solve it faster and accurately.
Every one is born with good listening skill but we live in a world of distraction which makes it a rare gift in recent scenario.
So, start following these simple ways if you want to improve your listening skills and want to know how you can efficiently utilise it to grow in your life.
- Maintaing an eye contact with speaker is one of the key ingredients for understanding the conversation going around. Look at the speaker even if he/ she is not looking at you. Stay focused and excuse the other person if they are not willing to.
- On establishing eye contact stay attentive yet relaxed. You have to not to continuously stare at the speaker but remain attentive or ready to serve if situation demands. Filter out all sort of distraction like background noise, speaker accent or your own thoughts and try to be at present, fully attentive.
- Listen the conversation with open mind. Don’t try to be judgemental and mentally criticise about the point or statement that has been made because you will lose your effectiveness of listening by doing that.
- Visualize the picture that speaker is trying to describe as it will help you to understand the speaker’s thoughts and ideas. Even if you that conversation doesn’t fascinate you, points presented are boring or not of your interest, force your mind from getting distracted and stay focussed.
- Never try to interrupt while speaker is talking as it symbolises wrong etiquete. Refrain yourself from giving solution until it’s asked for, as most of the people don’t want advise and want to figure out the solution by their own.
- Wait for speaker to pause then only you can clarify your doubts by asking question.
- Ask question for solely understanding the original topic without distracting from the theme.
- Empathy is the heart of good listening by which you are able to feel what speaker is feeling by placing yourself to speaker’s place.
- Give feedback to speaker simply by nodding, verbally or using facial expression like that you understood correctly what he/she is saying. It helps you create a connection or link by which you will understand the conversation well.
- Focus attention on non-verbal cues like facial expressions, gestures etc which is as important as words because it can help you to correlate with the spoken words while recalling it. Remember just like one expression may take a lot of words to explain it. When you are face to face then its impossible to neglect it.