Dear
Marilyn,
Wow, are people talking (and Listening). Your workshop was a
great success. Thank you so much for helping us with our listening skills. Your
information and activities were very enlightening and thought provoking. The
skills you shared with us will help all of us serve our clients more
effectively. The staff is much more understanding of each other and are
communicating better. I have had several requests for a follow-up with just our
agency. I know personally I learned so much about myself and how I have been
listening to others. I am working on my listening techniques so that I hear
with my whole person and not just my ears.
Thank you again fro sharing
your talents with us.
Sincerely
Julie R.
Thanks Mentoring
Program Coordinator
Listening
is an art. It is the art of educating our ears, our minds, and our eyes.
Listening is at the heart of communication. While hearing is an involuntary
physical act listening is a voluntary act
that occurs when an individual uses all of their senses to understand and
relate to another. Learning to listen is the essential skill that creates
relationships that leads to understanding and mutual respect. Deep heart listening is
going beneath the surface, back and forth between what you hear and what you
don't hear but sence. What you hear with your ears to what you feel down to your bones. This
form of listening unlocks layer and layer of meaning from one individual to
another. We interpret what we hear according to the way we listen. Words have
no meaning, people have meaning and meaning comes from inside of us. We
give words their meaning. According to psychologist Carl Rogers, "Deep
Listening is a life long practice". Going into the heart is a life long practice. Therefore, the more you learn how to
listen the more you listen.
Because our experiences, knowledge, and
attitudes differ we often misinterpret each other while believing that a common
understanding has been accomplished.
Listening is the key ingredient to be integrated by
organizations and their staff in order to transform the organizational culture
into one that fosters acceptance, support and empowerment in order to achieve
a shared goal.
According to the International Listening Association,
45% of our time is actually spent listening, while we are distracted,
preoccupied, or forgetful 75% of that time.
The adult attention span
averages twenty-two seconds and right after listening to someone we usually
recall about half of what we've actually heard. Within a few hours we remember
about 20%.
- Less than 5% of adults have had actual listening skills
training.
- How many of you have been taught to speak? How many of you
have been taught to listen?
- When surveyed, organizational and business
leaders rated listening as the most important skill for their companies.
-
While Listening is [100%] of effective communication, high schools and colleges
offer courses in public speaking but nothing is available in "public" listening.
The Art of Listening Workshops have been designed to
take a look at how we communicate, how we listen, and how we interpret the
information and emotions being expressed from one individual to another. The
filters, biases, stereotypes, judgments, and assessments we listen through
often cloud true communication and halt effective dialogue, causing confusion
and misunderstandings. These Workshops are organized around experiential
exercises, discussions and lecture that will teach the tools necessary for
effective listening and is suitable for anyone in your organization.
-
Do the dynamics of your organization promote effective communication for
achieving its goals?
- Are you interested in improving your sales and your
bottom line?
- Is "getting everyone on the same page" a concern in your
organization?
- Do you feel some people are not giving 100% and you don't
know why?
- Do projects typically start well and then bog down in
miscommunications and broken agreements?
- Do you want to take your staff
to the next level?
- Is your staff becoming diverse and misunderstandings
are occurring?
If you are a business, nonprofit or government agency
leader and are interested in offering your staff an opportunity to improve
their skills, have a cohesive work environment, create communication miracles
at work, and make a positive difference in the lives of the people you work
with, contact us for further information at (919) 362-7133 or email marilyn@powerofdialogue.com.
If you treat employees as if they make a difference to the organization then they will make a difference to the organization.
If you treat employees as if they make a difference to the
organization then they will make a difference to the organization.
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The Practice
