Coaching Tip: Listening
Category: Management, Staff Development, Projects, Delegation, Leadership (AE218)Originally Submitted on 3/20/2000.
Introduction
Listening is one of the best compliments we can pay each other. Listening requires a heart ready to receive and respond. Listening makes a profound statement that the one speaking has so much importance, their words take precedence over your time. Listening is showing respect and honor for the one speaking.
The Coaching Tip
To truly listen, opinions and points to be made must be set a side. Allowing new thought, new possibilities to evolve. Listening is stopping your internal talk, and leaving room for the possibility of change: for new input, for new considerations. Listening looks well behind the spoken words in order to pick up what the heart is meaning. It is making a secure statement that I am centered enough in my own beliefs, that you can speak without fear of my reprisal or withdrawal or interruption. Listening is allowing thought to be made manifest, excavating those deep feelings so they can be known and shared and worked with. Listening can be a gift of patience extended to the speaker, for some may need to speak in order to work through a difficult thing. Listening often leads to a word aptly spoken to comfort, to encourage or to show compassion. Listening is void of personal agenda. Listening is hearing the other person through the filter of their own manner, their own style. Listening is not fixing. Listening had better be used for good. Listening is such a pleasure when each truly care for each other, when the motives are to exchange, or care or grow. Listening is important to the Lord. He listens to you, and He so wants you to listen to Him. He desires that close personal two-way conversation -- just you and Him.Just think, if we listened more, others wouldn't have to talk so much.
About the Submitter
This piece was originally submitted by Duke, BS, FHIMSS, who can be reached at drohe, or visited on the web. Duke wants you to know: I am a performance improvement geek at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
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