Good communication skills require a high level of self-awareness.

By understanding your personal style of communicating, you will go a long way towards creating good and lasting impressions with others Listening is one of the most important skills you can have. How well you listen has a major impact on your job effectiveness, and on the quality of your relationships with others. Listening refers to the process of hearing and understanding a message. It can be music, speech, discussion, or any kind of verbal communication. Listening is one of the most frequently used skills in our daily lives. Good listeners are those who listen with understanding. Generally, it is assumed to be a natural and an in-built skill; however, it is a complicated process that requires mental and physical activities. It is highly essential to develop the listening skills for enhancing the communication process. Nearly 80% of each day is spent on listening and yet we are required to take efforts to make it effective. Skilled listening allows you to step into the other person's shoes and respond appropriately. An appropriate response states the speaker's feelings and content in a way that demonstrates acceptance and understanding that reflects what you heard the speaker say. We listen to obtain information. We listen to understand. We listen for enjoyment. We listen to learn. In fact most of us are not. Depending on the study being quoted, we remember between 25% and 50% of what we hear. That means that when you talk to your boss, colleagues, customers or spouse for 10 minutes, they pay attention to less than half of the conversation. Turn it around and it reveals that when you are receiving directions or being presented with information, you aren't hearing the whole message either. You hope the important parts are captured in your 25-50%, but what if they're not? Clearly, listening is a skill that we can all benefit from improving. By becoming a better listener, you will improve your productivity, as well as your ability to influence, persuade and negotiate. What's more, you'll avoid conflict and misunderstandings. All of these are necessary for workplace success!

Practical Steps for Effective Listening

1. Talk less. One of my students used to say that when she facilitated classes she always told her students that God gave you one mouth and two ears that should tell you something. 2. Get rid of distractions. If it is important for you to listen, do everything you can to eliminate internal and external noise and distractions that interfere with careful listening. 3. Dont judge prematurely. All of us are guilty of forming snap judgements and evaluating others before hearing them out especially when the speakers ideas conflict with our own. 4. Look for key ideas. We think much faster than people speak. To help focus attention (rather then drift off in boredom) extract the central idea.

5. Ask sincere questions. Devils advocate questions are really statements or criticisms in disguise. Sincere questions are requests for new information that clarifies a speakers thoughts or feelings. 6. Paraphrase. Reword the speakers thoughts in your own words to make sure your interpretation as a listener is accurate. 7. Suspend your own agenda. In other words, while you are listening, concentrate on what the speaker is saying not what you think. 8. Empathic listening. Empathic listening is knowing that given the same set of circumstances you might have done the same thing. It is the ability to experience the world from the others point of view. It doesnt necessarily mean that you agree, but that you understand. 9. Open your heart with love. Often we listen to score points and make ourselves right and the other person wrong. When we open our hearts to each other, we do so with the belief that we are all the same. We have the same feelings, fears, and hurts: doing the best we can with what we know.

Here are six types of listening, starting with basic discrimination of sounds and ending in deep communication.
Comprehension listening The next step beyond discriminating between different sound and sights is to make sense of them. To comprehend the meaning requires first having a lexicon of words at our fingertips and also all rules of grammar and syntax by which we can understand what others are saying. The same is true, of course, for the visual components of communication, and an understanding of body language helps us understand what the other person is really meaning. In communication, some words are more important and some less so, and comprehension often benefits from extraction of key facts and items from a long spiel. Comprehension listening is also known as content listening, informative listening and full listening. Critical listening Critical listening is listening in order to evaluate and judge, forming opinion about what is being said. Judgment includes assessing strengths and weaknesses, agreement and approval. This form of listening requires significant real-time cognitive effort as the listener analyzes what is being said, relating it to existing knowledge and rules, whilst simultaneously listening to the ongoing words from the speaker. Appreciative listening In appreciative listening, we seek certain information which will appreciate, for example that which helps meet our needs and goals. We use appreciative listening when we are listening to good music, poetry or maybe even the stirring words of a great leader. Empathetic listening

When we listen empathetically, we go beyond sympathy to seek a truer understand how others are feeling. This requires excellent discrimination and close attention to the nuances of emotional signals. When we are being truly empathetic, we actually feel what they are feeling. In order to get others to expose these deep parts of themselves to us, we also need to demonstrate our empathy in our demeanor towards them, asking sensitively and in a way that encourages selfdisclosure. Therapeutic listening In therapeutic listening, the listener has a purpose of not only empathizing with the speaker but also to use this deep connection in order to help the speaker understand, change or develop in some way. This not only happens when you go to see a therapist but also in many social situations, where friends and family seek to both diagnose problems from listening and also to help the speaker cure themselves, perhaps by some cathartic process. This also happens in work situations, where managers, HR people, trainers and coaches seek to help employees learn and develop. Dialogic listening The word 'dialogue' stems from the Greek words 'dia', meaning 'through' and 'logos' meaning 'words'. Thus dialogic listening mean learning through conversation and an engaged interchange of ideas and information in which we actively seek to learn more about the person and how they think. Dialogic listening is sometimes known as 'relational listening'. Relationship listening Sometimes the most important factor in listening is in order to develop or sustain a relationship. This is why lovers talk for hours and attend closely to what each other has to say when the same words from someone else would seem to be rather boring. Relationship listening is also important in areas such as negotiation and sales, where it is helpful if the other person likes you and trusts you.