Are you a good listener? Research tells us our appreciation of our own listening skills is way off. We may think we are good listeners, and yet many people would say we are not. Most of us have the ability to hear unless we have a physical problem that prevents us. In reality we can all hear in some way but it is our unique filtering and interpretation that makes our hearing different from each other.
We may believe our communication is clear but we don’t know until we get a response that accurately reflects what we said. It is important in our business to understand how we personally listen because the issue with listening in general is how we interpret information and how people hear us. The more competet we become increases our ability to get our messages across. This is definitely something we are capable of developing.
The first step is learning to understand how we listen. Our listening style develops throughout our life in response to all of our personal experiences. The impact on us varies according to the experience. Eventually the way we listen mostly becomes a sub-conscious skill. At the same time our brain learns to filter out the myriad of things we see and hear in 
every moment. It needs to do this because we hear millions of things in any one moment and we would probably go mad if our brain didn’t filter out what it thinks we don’t need. Basically our brain is ensuring we survive by ensuring we hear only what it believes is necessary.
In our business we want to connect with as many people as possible with the intention of enrolling at least one
person a month. Understanding how we listen is important because it has a direct impact on how we communicate and how people see us. The more we understand how we listen creates more choices with our responses. Listening means with the ears, eyes, nose, touch, brain and heart because these are all capable of listening. All of these listening senses are interpreted by our brain in their own unique way.
Our listening is also affected by our current environment. We all know stress causes us to behave differently, however even under stress people react in a variety of ways. For example some of us mumble, some talk non-stop, some people gain confidence, some of us can’t think, and lots more. What we want to do is learn what our behaviours are in different circumstances. When we accept our reality we can learn new responses in these situations.
Outcomes from our communication can improve as we change our responses. When our outcomes improve so does our confidence and that is certain to increase our effectiveness.
