Improve Your Listening

598 Words3 Pages
Effective listening is arguably one of the most important skills to have today. Personal relationships need good listening to face complicated issues together. Business people and employees need effective listening skills to solve complex problems quickly and stay competitive. Effective listening is not about the words having delivered, it requires more than hearing the sounds transmitted. The two barriers I faced when I try to listen are environmental distractions and assumptions. Environmental distractions are cell phones, music players, TV, and portable gaming consoles just to name a few. In today’s busy lifestyle multi-tasking has become the norm not the exception. I have fallen victim to multi-tasking. Arriving home, I’m trying to put dinner on the table, answer homework questions, have a meaningful conversation with my husband and answer urgent work emails all at the same time. During dinner, the TV is on. Instead of listening to my family’s account of their day, I’m staring at the TV thinking about the evening tasks and schedule. As a listener, I have to remove the distractions and focus on the conversation at hand to be an effective listener. I need to block out all of the distractions and focus on each conversation that is happening around the dinner table. One way I can block the distractions is turn off the TV and silent my Blackberry. My family is important to me and their conversations are important to me. I need to work on giving my family my undivided attention. By doing so, I will not miss a beat in the conversation. In taking with my husband, I develop assumptions and pre-conceived notions of our conversation. The human mind is mysterious and it can process a lot of information especially in between conversation while the other party is still talking, there is a tendency to interrupt because we assume that we already know what the
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