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Point Taken Summer Newsletter: Issue 20 |
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PSSST! Hey! You!In the Point Taken offices we rarely run into inter-office conflict, but if we do, one of our faithful communication devotees often quips in with a statistic about how most miscommunication occurs when we don’t practice effective listening skills. This newsletter delves into what it takes to not only hear what is said but to really improve our interactions with active listening. While you are at it scroll down and check out the new interactive portion of our website, the Workshop Finder. Meeting Pointers: Listen UPAll communication involves a sender and a receiver (or group of receivers). The sender has a message to articulate and then the receiver nods his or her head in agreement. But does he or she really agree? Listeners are often pre-occupied with their own agenda, ideas and perceptions that can cloud their ability to really hear what is really being said. Below are the skills that are required to be an “active listener” and avoid many common listening pitfalls Here’s what people see on the outside to judge your listening ability:
Here’s what happens in your head while listening:
Listen carefully to the words that are spoken. You probably spend more time using your listening skills than any other kind of skill. Beware of internal distractions (your thoughts and feelings) as well as external distractions. And remember, like other skills, listening takes practice. Workshop Finder:We acknowledge that it is sometimes difficult to determine which Point Taken workshop best fits the needs of your organization. There is so much great content; it is too hard to choose! That is why our web guru’s have created a workshop finder on our website that points you in the right direction. Go to www.pointtaken.net/workshops/workshop-finder.php and try it out for yourself. Remember all of our workshops are customizable to fit the needs of your organization. Contact us for a custom agenda and pricing. Got any points you want taken?Send us an email at [email protected] |
Her Point Exactly:
Listening is a subject that always provokes a heated discussion in our workshops. We cannot always review this skill set with the detachment we use when learning other skills, because as a topic, it seems so personal. Most of the ‘listening issues’ that are brought up in our workshops reference personal relationships, like with spouses, significant others, or children. Which makes me particularly wary about bringing up this next topic, but here goes: A recent study at the University of Sheffield in the UK, and published in NeuroImage, found that men use different parts of their brain when processing female voices than when processing male voices. Magnetic Resonance Imaging was used to find out what happened inside our brains when we listened to others. Men ‘listen’ to female voices with the same part of the brain that processes music, while they ‘listen’ to male voices in the part of the brain that is referred to as the ‘mind’s eye’, where people compare experiences to themselves. This difference could explain a lot – there are more challenges to listening then we are even aware of. Listening well is hard work, and we need a framework for hearing that leads to understanding. This newsletter has a few pointers for getting from hearing ‘music’ to comprehension, so give it a look. And before we use this to condemn an entire gender for their poor listening – the study only had male subjects, so we can’t be certain what happens when women listen!
~Beth Rogers 
90% of a workday involves some form of communication. It is estimated that about 70% of that time is spent in active listening. According to Stanley Coren, a psychologist who has performed a significant amount of research on the subject of dog intelligence, suggests that average trained dogs know about 160 words. "When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen." 
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