WHAT WE HAVE LEARNT ABOUT LISTENING
“Sharing what we’ve learnt is at the heart of how we work.”
Listening well is at the heart of living better
It changes how you are with others and in the world.
Listening makes people feel valued and that they belong
They feel heard and seen.
Listening generates trust
It helps to build robust, courageous teams and organisations, enabling them to create outstanding results.
Listening enables creative responses to difficult stuff
Listening is the key to group problem-solving, to drawing on others’ expertise and finding solutions that outstrip any that an individual could produce. It is an essential foundation for harnessing diversity.
Good listening is an essential component of organisational change
Leaders need to communicate a vision and listen to feedback.
Listening is simple but far from easy
It is a natural skill and way of operating. But it can be lost if it underused or undervalued. It needs to be honed and developed if it is to be good enough for today’s challenges.
Listening is hard because of the pace and intensity of business
Listening requires space, time, clear intention, attention, quietness and stillness. All of these are in short supply in most working environments, and lives.
Listening is hard because of individual preferences, relational factors and systems, as well as environmental factors
Individual habits, assumptions, patterns of thoughts, fears and needs get in the way. The challenges increase when we listen to people with different preferences and ways of listening. Many businesses also make listening systemically difficult.
Getting better at listening depends on commitment and intention
It involves behaviour change as well skill acquisition. It rests on deep self-awareness and on-going work. This means unlearning some habits and ways of viewing the world. Everyone can do that if they commit.
You can become a good listener if you unleash your listening
It involves high quality attention, deep curiosity, listening with all your senses, and with your felt response and intuition. Great listeners don’t do listening, they are the listener.
Get in touch
“Being heard is so close to being loved that for
the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.”
David Augsburger
If you would like to talk about developing your listening as a leader or about how we might work with your team or group, get in touch
SEND US A MESSAGE
hello@unleashinglistening.com
07952 761289