Listening is one of the most powerful tools you can develop to help you become more successful. Listening is the 4th tenet in John Maxwell’s book “Becoming a Person of Influence”. We’ll explore this quality over the next few days on this blog and see how it can improve our communication skills.
Listening is defined as “make an effort to hear something” and “to pay attention; heed”. Put another way, listening is wanting to hear. Most people spend a good part of their day listening. Statistics from Brian Adams of Sales Cybernetics indicate the following percentages
We spend
9% of the day writing,
16% of the day reading,
30% of the day speaking
45% of the day listening.
As you can see listening is an important part of our lives.
In his book, John Maxwell notes that listening is a valuable skill and provides the following benefits
1. Shows respect
2. Builds relationships
3. Increases knowledge
4. Generates ideas
5. Builds loyalty
Over the next week we’ll take each one of the benefits and examine the qualities of an effective listener. We’ll also look at some tips and tricks to help us remember peoples names and understand them better.
Tomorrow… The thing that people want to hear most… their name.
