Are you sometimes tuning out when someone is speaking to you or even trying to formulate
your thought? Well stay tuned because in this video I'm going to share with you
how you can improve your listening skills to get your points across.
If you stay tuned to the end of this video, I'm going to show you how you can get your hands on
an amazing free download that is not only going to help you with listening, but your projects too.
Hi, welcome. If you're new here, my name is Adriana Girdler and on this channel,
you're going to get the best career and project management advice, well, at least in my opinion.
Please consider subscribing as it helps us grow this awesome community. Now, if you want to learn
some tips on listening skill, let's get it to it. Understand why you need to listen. If you're going
to build genuine relationships in the working environment or really even personally as well,
it is so important to have great listening skills. Listening allows you to take in the other person's
content, allows you to disseminate that information and properly respond back.
Listening is part of good communication. You have two ears and one mouth and what does that
mean? It means we're supposed to listen more than we are to speak. So really having good listening
skills is going to help your relationships professionally, personally, just overall help you
really disseminate information because you're going to be listening, gathering insights, which
is going to allow you to collect your information properly to give a proper comeback. Oh, oh, oh,
prepare yourself to listen, all right. First of all, get rid of any external distractions.
Namely this lovely phone, put it all on silent so it's not going to interrupt. Maybe even put
it away. You know what I'm going to do for you guys? I'm going to put it on the ground
because I have to go pick it up. If you have a door to your office,
consider closing it and putting up a power hour so that people know you are not to be
disturbed so that you can listen. The worst is when you're having a conversation with someone,
whether it's in person in or whether it's virtual and someone walks into your office
asking you stuff like, hey whoa, wait a minute. So ensure that you remove distractions around you.
Now another distraction to consider is something that is more internal distractions. Do you have
to go to the washroom? Are you hungry? Is your stomach growling? Mine is, by the way,
in case you heard it, I'm just starving right now. So that's making it difficult for me to
concentrate because I'm thinking about food. Can't wait to finish this video so I can eat
something. No, no, no, no, seriously. I'm very excited to be here making this video.
But that's what I mean. It's those internal distractions and worse yet, when you have
to go to the washroom, you know how hard it's to pay attention? So just remove those distractions
externally and internally, it's really going to help you prepare yourself to listen.
Check your body language. You know what they say is that most language comes through when we're
speaking in our body, that interpretation versus necessarily our words. So it's really important
to see what is my body doing? Am I head on looking at you, facing you with open body language or am I
closed off? I do talk about this in other videos, the importance of communication. So this is just
a reiteration of that and that part of that is that body language. So really about how your body,
what message is it giving? Are your hands in your back pockets? Are they in your front pockets?
Those little nuancey things. Now, how do you do this virtually? Because I'm on calls where
sometimes people don't have their video on. And then it's really hard for me to understand their
body language. And I get so much more information from watching them listening to something
that I'm saying, are they agreeing with it? Not agreeing with it. I get more information that way
than I do if they were to say yes, Adriana, I agree with everything that you're saying.
So virtually have your camera on. That's just going to ensure that you have really good
communication and help with listening. Ask questions to clarify. So if you're
already trying to prepare your response when someone is talking, you are so not listening.
So the key is, ask clarifying questions of what the person just said. So that really shows that A,
you're listening and it's going to get confirmation for you that you actually
listened and interpreted the right thing. So how do you do this? You're speaking to John.
John is talking, and when he's done speaking, because you're going to allow him to finish,
because you've been listening, you're not jumping in with your retort. So you say, "John,
I just want to clarify that I understood what you said and that I'm on the same page with you.
So you said A blah, blah, blah, B blah, blah, blah, C blah, blah, blah.
Did I interpret that correctly?" And he's going to say, "Yeah, you did." And how cool is that? And
there have been times I've done that and someone said, "No, actually that is not what I meant."
Whoa, which kind of surprised me because at the time when they said no, I was like,
"Really? I really thought you meant what I just said, A B C D." So that becomes really helpful
because it then gives you the clarity you need in order to move on to the next item of business
or whatever it is. So that is really, really important is ask those clarifying questions.
Limit judgements. I feel like that is really heavy. Well,
it is because if you're judging what someone else is saying, as you're listening to them,
you're actually not listening. You're judging what they're saying. Here's the thing everybody
has a different perspective. I may not agree with your perspective or I may want your perspective
to go in a different direction. Particularly if I have an agenda, like a project item and
I don't want to do something and I want you to go in a different way, but I need to listen.
I need to understand your argument. I need to understand where you're coming from so I can
properly give the right retort. And if I'm judging you based on what you're saying, like, oh, they
don't know anything. I can't believe they're even offering this suggestion. You're not listening.
So how can you properly get the information you need in order to bring it to where you're hoping
it will go that's beneficial for everybody. So limit that. Understand people have a perspective,
there's back stories to everything. You don't know the backstory to everybody's personal life,
professional life, a reason why something was done. Yeah, you may not agree with it for the
one sentence that's said, but there could be a huge backstory behind it. Don't judge it. Listen,
ask clarifying questions to get even more information. It becomes really important.
So that's going to help you tremendously when it comes to improving your listening skills.
Now that you know some really easy tips on how to improve your listening skills, here's another
really easy tip. Go to the link underneath this YouTube video and get this free download.
If you want to excel professionally, obviously you do because you're here watching this video,
wanting to learn how to get better listening skills, you need to download this. This is
going to give you information you need on how to make sure your projects don't fail. But
the cool thing too is it doesn't just relate to projects. It just relates to business as
well. And it's for you, free, check it out. If you learned something new in this video,
please give it a like, as it tells YouTube that we have some really good content
worthy of additional sharing. So please do it. It really helps us out. On that note,
if you have any other additional listening tips you'd like to add, put them in the comments below.
I'd love to hear from you until. The next video, see you later.