Being an Effective Listener builds relationships
How many times have you listened to someone and found that you have come awayknowing them better for it? When a person speaks, they reveal a lot aboutthemselves. So, if you want to know a person better and understand theirmotives, dreams and desires, then it makes sense to listen more closely.
Being an Effective Listener is a key skill
While everyone can hear, not all people have the ability to listen as attentively asothers. This is why listening is often listed as a desired skill set. Being aneffective listener is a key skill in building any relationships.
When you start to effectively listen, you gain more insights such as:
- Understanding what others expect of themselves and you
- Building better relationships with everyone
- Resolving issues more quickly
- Having improved understanding of what people are trying to tell you
- Knowing how to respond appropriately
- Becoming a trusted and respected person
- Why People feel empowered around you
Trust is a key benefit in Effective Listening
When you fail to effectively listen, the trust level others has drops substantially.There are actually physical and mental barriers that you need to overcome in orderto become good at listening. The most common ones include things like:
- Prejudice
- Language and accent barriers
- Noise levels
- Fear
- Anger
- Worry
- Poorattention span
- Hearingissues
Communication matters
Some of these barriers are going to prevent even the best effective listener tofully understand the issue. One example is trying to listen to someone who isnot speaking their native language and has an accent. They may be relaying thecorrect words, but the accent may be in the way of some people hearing the intendedmessage. No matter how hard they try to pronounce words correctly they are justnot understood.
Be open and Communicate
So, what can you do if you are having a hard time understanding someone? A goodactive effective listener will often try to do the following things to improvetheir comprehension of the situation.
- Create an appropriate space to eliminate distractions
- Maintain eye contact
- Nod and smile to indicate that you are listening which shows respect
- Ask appropriate questions
- Let them know you are having trouble understanding them
By doing these things, you are showing the person that you are interested in whatthey have to say. This can be very helpful and can put the person speaking atease. Quite often, they are having some of the same issues with you and a collaborativeeffort will go a long way. By helping each other, you will build a strongrelationship and one of great mutual lasting respect.
Anyone can do it
As you can see it is not that difficult to improve your listening skills. For moredetailed information on the topic of Communication, visit our coaching websiteat https://www.cindybishoptraining.comfor our Guidebook on this topic. Interested in quality effective coaching?Check out: https://www.cindybishoptraining.com/coaching/
About the Author
Cindy Bishop is a real estate business development coach. After a long career in real estate sales, she foundbetter ways to achieve sales success by developing habits and methods thatworked to create income consistency. Cindy’s real estate business wasn’t unlikeyours with door knocking, sphere marketing, and of course, holding open houses.Learning better communication skills allowed her to become a top producingagent. You can too!
Check out her published Communication book…