Good Communication Depends On The Art Of Listening
Show the esteem you have for your interlocutor by showing an exemplary demand towards yourself.
You should meet the butcher in my town. He runs a small butcher shop and I always wondered how and where this man learned to communicate. Is he just old-school? Is it instinct? I do not know. But he greets each customer by name and knows their preferences and tastes perfectly because he talks to them like this: “Hello, Mrs. Guilane. Did you like yesterday’s cake? What can I serve you today, Mrs. Guilane? … You’ll see, this cake is good, I specially chose it to be juicy, just the way you like it… Goodbye and have a nice afternoon, Mrs. Guilane.”
I guarantee you that he has an enormous clientele, who appreciate him and who don’t even think about giving him up. With him, the clients feel like kings, they are kings: they enjoy going there, being recognized, differentiated from other clients and visibly appreciated. I also point out that I have seen how he, a man who communicates so well, knows how to shake off his employees and apprentices who move too slow and congratulate those who open their eyes well and move quickly. So, he’s neither snobbish, nor bland, nor a stupid boss. But he knows how to communicate.
How do you see yourself in the background of your words: through the attitude of gratitude of the one who serves you, or through a conscious effort to perceive a situation in which you wonder what place belongs to you?
Why listen ! If you didn’t listen, you wouldn’t learn anything. You would be destined to spin in circles, around your own conceptions, ideas, thoughts, without anything to enrich them, to diversify them, to bring them new air and fresh blood.
Therefore, listening is something that enriches you greatly, it means giving you access to information. it means opening yourself up to understand the other, a useful thing when we have to convince him of something. Listen, encourage your interlocutor to speak, to express himself with his words. There is nothing more annoying than someone finishing your sentence that you didn’t get to say. Respect your interlocutor and get to know him. He will also listen to you all the more when you have something to convey to him.
Listening to someone is proving that they exist for you. It means proving yourself worth listening to – which, by default, is a gift that can be given between people. It is not like that? It’s up to you to find ways to please the other person, whether it’s a customer, banker, butcher, boss, associate, employees, colleagues. A successful communication that achieves your goal should always involve something pleasant for the other person – and for you too, if only because it’s nicer, isn’t it, to feel that you have the power to do it make others happy.
Leadership includes a form of unconditional listening, one that does not judge, does not blame, but that makes you consciously and voluntarily remember and relate the facts that constitute the subject of a subsequent convention.
Good Communication Depends On The Art Of Listening, but receiving a message, as well as preparing in the inner speech a response to what is heard, is a prerequisite for adopting a decision that can follow you for the rest of your life.
Making others listen to you is the greatest vector of authentic power you can have over them. Therefore, enrich your ability to perceive and understand the world around you through a listening that forces to say out loud what was meant to be silent and sunk in silence.
Be demanding of yourself, be worthy of the listening you practice in the world so that the information transmitted is perceived as an acceptable success of self-control, or as a permanent process of change and transformation, but in no case should it be perceived as a compulsion inner drive that pushes you to do something specific.
* Note: Erica Guilane-Nachez - Şansa e de partea ta, Editura Polirom, 2003.
