The Importance of Listening

Many times the importance of listening is underestimated. How many times do we make our work with clients harder or miss the opportunity to maintain meaningful relationships with colleagues, friends, and family because we do not know how to listen to them?

Márcio Fernandes

"The true leader acts as a facilitator so the team can work comfortably day to day and, consequently, develop and perform to its full potential".

The ability to listen is not related only to the leader, but also to the employee. Seeking to understand what the other person proposes is essential to generate results faster, so questioning is part of the process and demonstrates involvement. When we improve our ability to listen, we improve our speech as well. Our speech becomes more coherent and sincere. The other person notices this, which generates empathy.

Listening Is Essential for Building Good Relationships.

The importance of listening and hearing has the same meaning, because they are synonyms, but in the process of relating to others their use ends up being quite different. For some specialists, there is a clear difference between hearing and listening to another person.

Hearing is like naturally using a biological organ of your body, which requires no reasoning effort on your part. It is like sitting, watching TV and, at the same time, picking up external sounds from the environment. In the case of listening, it is not quite like that - it requires different attention and action from you.

When you are actually listening to a person speak, you are certainly using a large part of your sensory channels. Using sensory channels in dialogue means being fully present, because you are observing the person's facial expression, hearing the tone of voice and, often, capturing the perception of what is really behind a simple question.

In fact, not knowing how to listen causes many problems for people, whether inside companies, in contact with clients, in attention to coworkers, or even when we are in our social circle.

Sometimes we interrupt the client, dumping information, anticipating answers and forgetting to simply listen to the other side.

What does the client really want and need from you?

In service, it is important to listen carefully to what the client is saying before giving any answer. Do not get ahead of yourself. Just listen!

When we are listening:

• We are not being hasty.
• We listen with all our sensory channels (vision, hearing, kinesthetic).
• We pay attention to the nonverbal.
• We are fully present.
• We can give appropriate feedback to the other person.
• We demonstrate with this listening attitude that the other person is important to us.
• We demonstrate that they are speaking with the right person.
• We make the other person feel important.

So that you can create more meaningful relationships in your work and personal life, learn to truly listen to people. You only have to gain from it.

Listening is a daily exercise!

To develop the ability to listen, you need to know yourself. To fully understand the importance of listening, it is necessary to reflect on and evaluate your behaviors and attitudes, to have inner silence to know that no one is perfect and that everyone can improve. You need to use your own repertoire to understand a situation and thus develop new skills.

Knowing how to listen to what is different adds much more to your own development and to the company. Those who know how to listen can understand the importance of speech and consequently improve their interpersonal relationships.

Tips to Improve Your Listening Ability

Offer your full attention

When you make yourself available to listen to someone, it is important that you are willing to dedicate all your attention to that person for a few minutes. 

Maintain eye contact

Eye contact is an essential element to demonstrate attention and a receptive posture. Surely, you have felt uncomfortable when speaking to someone and the person was looking to the side, at the floor, at the ceiling... This happens because instinctively we associate looking away with lack of interest.

Do not interrupt

To be a good listener, it is essential to know that the most important thing is what is being said, so there should be no interruptions. You should only ask a question if it is to request details about what is being said.

Do not trivialize the account

Each person has their subjectivity, a way of establishing what is important, distressing, exciting, a source of joy, nervousness, etc. Therefore, do not listen trying to interpret the facts according to your own standards, because that could lead you to make one of the worst mistakes: trivializing the other person's story.

Avoid talking about yourself

A good listener focuses on the other person's experience, not their own. Changing the focus of the conversation and starting to talk about yourself would be like giving yourself more importance. This, besides causing discomfort in the speaker, can even be offensive.