Working on your listening skills is an ongoing process to becoming a good listener. Taking the time to listen to someone is not always an easy, especially when you are at work. We have a thousand things we are thinking about that need to get done and someone is demanding our attention by talking to us.
We have a hard time stopping and changing our focus. It takes shifting our thoughts, to try to understand what the person is actually saying. That alone is not an easy task.
Listening skill are essential in the customer service field. People come to us for help and are expecting us to be able to listen to their problems or desires in order to help them.
There is a difference between hearing someone and actually listening to what they are saying.
Hearing: Is simply the physical effort of taking in the speaker’s message, but does not necessarily mean that the message was received, processed, or responded to.
Listening: Is the process of receiving a message from the speakers, processing it to make sense out of it and then responding to it in a way that shows understanding of what the speaker spoke.
Most people use only 25-30% of their listening potential. I found this to be pretty amazing.
There is a difference in speaking and listening rates. Speakers speak at a rate of 125-150 words per minute, but we can listen and receive about 400-500 words per minute.
It is easy to see how we lose interest in what someone is saying and not really listen to him or her because we get distracted between the speed that they can speak and the accelerated rate that we can listen.
Our mind begins to wander, that is why so many times when someone is speaking we really do not hear what they are saying because our mind it light-years a head of their actual words.
There are a few essential key points to good listening skills to remember; face the person who is speaking to you, focus on the words they are saying. It is okay to ask them to repeat what they said; at least they will know you are trying to understand them.
Keep quite until they have finished what they have to say, do not jump to conclusions before they are done. Take a quick moment before you answer them to process what was said and what your response should be, and make sure you are wearing a smile.
“Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking.” –Bernard Baruch
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