Listening well is just as important as speaking well

Most people are shockingly poor listeners -- a lot of times we fake paying attention and even if we are paying attention, most research suggests that we only grasp 50% of what we hear and after two days we forget half of that information.  Think about that for a second.  If you give an important speech that has a great deal of information in it, after two days, most people will only remember 25% of what you said.

While ensuring that the audience listens to you is important, I wanted to look at a different aspect of communication:  Are YOU listening to your audience?  Its an interesting question that you should be asking yourself.  What does it mean to listen to your audience?  Well, there are several different aspects that you should focus on while giving your speech to ensure that you are listening.

1.  If you are using feedback posts like Twitter (as mentioned in this blog post) or something similar, make sure to read each of them carefully and address something if it is being brought up by a few people.

2.  If there is a Q & A session during part of your speech, make sure you carefully listen to each person to ensure that you understand where they are coming from and what exactly their question is.

3.  If someone brings up a concern that they have during a break, make sure that you listen to their concern and don't just brush it aside.  Joseph Thornley of Thornley Fallis talks about this in his recent blog post.  He stated that he didn't really listen to one of the audience members concerns and sort of brushed it aside.  Needless to say, his review was not very good from that person.  

While those are some specific areas that you can improve your listening, there are a lot of different ways you can improve your listening for everyday things and not just when you are speaking.  First of all you need to take listening seriously.  Listening is an active process and you have to be engaged in it if you want to be successful.  Secondly, try to avoid distractions such as focusing too much on the persons delivery or a quirk in their presentation or focusing on some outside event that is making noise.  Eliminating distractions can greatly improve your listening skills.  

Unfortunately, there is so much more to listening, but I don't want to have this post go on for too long.  What we as speakers and communicators need to remember is that a great deal of communication is listening.  Remember that, and you will become successful in whatever business you are in.

Travis

Comments

[Oxy]

I have followed all things that you said. Thanks.