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How to Use Active Listening to Enhance Communication Skills?

Guest post by: Paul Anderson

Article Overview: In today’s world, communication skill is critical. A good part of communication skill is listening skills. A good listener shows that he is interested in what the other person has to say and through active listening can demonstrate his or her interest in the topic. Active listening is a skill that everyone can learn. All you need to do is to follow a set of principles and keep practising until you get it right. Active listening is about showing your undivided attention to others in a way to maximise the effectiveness of the communication while also showing the other person that you are listening to them.

How to Use Active Listening to Enhance Communication Skills?

In today’s world, communication skill is critical. A good part of communication skill is listening skills. A good listener shows that he is interested in what the other person has to say and through active listening can demonstrate his or her interest in the topic.

Active listening is a skill that everyone can learn. All you need to do is to follow a set of principles and keep practicing until you get it right. Active listening is about showing your undivided attention to others in a way to maximise the effectiveness of the communication while also showing the other person that you are listening to them.

To practice Active Listening, follow these principles:

Body Language Skills

• Keep eye contact at all times. Avoid looking down to your shoes, or the board or a report while talking. Instead, quickly re-establish eye contact again.
• Make sure you have an open body posture as opposed to a closed posture. Don’t cross your arms, don’t cross your legs and keep showing the palm of your hands.
• Nod your head while listening to show that they have your undivided attention.
• Smile and appear interested.
• Every now and then change your facial expression based on what you are hearing. Look concerned when a critical piece of information is shared. Laugh or smile when the speaker wants to be funny. Appear serious when the speaker is passionate about the subject.
• Observe body orientation. Don’t stand in front of them directly. Instead, allow a 45 degree angle to appear less confrontational.

Verbal Skills

• While you nod, say “aha”, or deliver other confirmation signals to show that you understand what has been said.
• Reflect on what is discussed in your own words. This is much like mirroring someone else. All you need to do is to pick up their message and deliver it in your own words. For example,
  • Speaker: “We need to establish a new group to sort this out”.
  • You: “So, what you mean is to setup a new department to handle this systematically”
• Ask questions to guide the conversation towards the direction of your choice. Your questions also show that you are interested in the conversation. It shows that you are interested enough to like to expand it further.

Strategy

• Don’t interrupt the speaker. Let him express himself fully.
• Don’t be tempted to provide counter-argument in the middle of the conversation. This will make you appear defensive and encourages the speaker to become more aggressive.
• Stay focused on the conversation and prevent yourself from drifting. Use the following techniques to achieve this:
  • Mentally repeat the words the speaker says in your mind to remember what is discussed.
  • Mentally rehearse what you want to say or ask once the conversation comes to a natural end.
  • If under your control, go to an environment where you can minimise distractions.
• Express your opinion respectfully.
• Take the speaker seriously and show that his thoughts are valuable.
• Summarise the speakers’ comments periodically to show that you are actively listening while also put a structure into the conversation which prevents you from drifting from the main topic of the conversation.
• As you can see, active listening requires concentration and attention to detail. You need to be in the state of flow while your entire attention is focused on the speaker and what he or she has to deliver. This focus helps you to understand more about the person and also helps you to exchange more information in a shorter amount of time.

Keep practicing the skills until you can replace your old habits with the new skills. For more training on this skill and similar communication skills, you can take advantage of soft skills training materials. See below for more details on how to obtain these training materials.

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Article Tags: Active Listening, Communication Skills, Training, Training Materials



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