Listening Skills

“Take advantage of every opportunity to practice your communication skills so that when important occasions arise, you will have the gift, the style, the sharpness, the clarity, and the emotions to affect other people.”

Jim Rohn

Listening skills is perhaps one of the most important skills used when communicating with others. Imagine what happens when people discover that you are not listening to them or don’t care much about them. Naturally, they are quick to distance themselves from you. Everyone loves to be listened to, but unfortunately we never seem to be doing enough listening. People are deprived of listening and those who can master this skill and establish themselves as good listeners stand to gain enormously as they can make long lasting friendships with others. By developing a reputation of being a good listener an individual can transform his life in many dimensions.

This course aims to help delegates master the art of listening in professional and personal settings. Listening, like all skills, can be mastered through guidance, practice and persistence. This course is designed around numerous examples as this is the most effective way to learn. The course is full of examples that clearly demonstrate what each listening guideline suggests. In particular, several examples of bad listening are provided so delegates can see clearly which method works and which doesn’t.

All sessions include exercises to allow delegates practice the listening skills discussed in each session. Various areas are explored such as listener personalities, types of listening, bad listening habits, use of toxic words, questioning skills to encourage constructive conversations and many others.

The training materials come complete with all the necessary content such as workbook, slides, course notes, exercises, etc. which allow trainers to quickly run the course based on their specific demand.

In this highly practical course delegates will learn:

Why Listening is Important

• Why people don’t listen?
• How miscommunication happens?
• What is the secret to good communication skills?

Active Listening

• What are different listening styles?
• What listening styles are more effective?
• What is Active Listening?
• What is Empathic Listening?
• How can you formulate your conversation to establish rapport and get immediate results?

Listening Spectrum

• How people listen and how can you use a systematic method to improve your own style?
• What is the ideal personality while listening?

Bad Listening

• What not to say in conversations?
• How to use example conversations to improve your listening
• How to improve your listening using a series of fundamental and proven guidelines

Asking Effective Questions

• What are the most effective questions to ask while listening?
• What types of questions should you avoid?

Critical Responses

• How to avoid using toxic words in conversations that can immediately change the nature of your interaction
• What toxic words should you avoid?

Difficult Listeners

• What types of difficult listeners exit?
• What is the behaviour of each type?
• What are the best strategies to handle each type?

Audience: Anyone

Prerequisites: None

Course Duration: 1 Day

Course Level: Beginners & Intermediate

By the end of this course the delegates will be able to:

• Appreciate the critical importance of listening and learn the secret to good communication skills
• Use Active Listening techniques to establish rapport and leave a positive impression
• Improve your understanding of different personalities when listening and aim to improve your own style
• Avoid falling into bad habits when listening to others and use established listening guidelines to make others feel more comfortable with you
• Ask effective questions to encourage others to provide more information without limiting the conversation unnecessarily
• Avoid using words that trigger negative emotional responses in order to improve your listening skills
• Respond to difficult people by classifying them into abstract types and use the most ideal strategies to handle each type

We all develop certain listening habits and some of these habits are unfortunately not very effective. The listening skills course aims to increase the delegate’s awareness about these particular habits and show, usually through many examples, how their conversations can be improved. Critically, delegates will learn that this can be achieved quite easily by following guidelines which produce incredible results.

The course is designed specifically around example conversations rather than simply taking the delegates through a number of bullet points. In our experience, this is much more effective since delegates can draw up guidelines themselves based on the examples they go through and the exercises they participate in. This helps them to learn the skills quickly and also remember them long after the course.