Listening Skills addresses the core communication skill of listening from a business perspective. 22 ready-to-run activities address the 'soft' side of listening skills, linking them to the 'hard' commercial benefits.
This versatile pack addresses a wide range of skills: some activities are basic and introductory and others are advanced activities, suitable for those who are improving and refining their skills. The more advanced activities cover vital areas such as empathising, transactional analysis, incongruence between words and body language, using listening skills to reveal emotions, and pacing tone/energy and speed of speech.
Dip into this goldmine of ready-made activities for your training courses on customer care, negotiation, recruitment and appraisal interviewing, mentoring, meetings, and conflict management.
Listening Skills gives you time-saving, inspiring activities to create better listeners, who will win more business, retain more customers, motivate others and be 'in tune' with their people. Each activity provides a structured learning experience, aimed at learning a new skill, or sometimes at consolidating an emerging one. 'Wrap-up' sections emphasise the main learning points from each activity. They demonstrate how participants can apply what they've learned and the importance of doing so.
List of Activities:
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1 Lend me your ear
This activity helps participants to appreciate the value of listening in their working lives. It will help them to judge when someone just wants a listening ear and when they need some other kind of help. It looks at the different ways in which people can be helped, such as advising or teaching, and clarifies the differences between these kinds of help and listening.
2 Where did I go wrong?
Most of us have some bad listening habits such as interrupting or daydreaming. This activity identifies how we feel when we are on the receiving end of good and bad listening. Participants will explore the effects that bad habits can have and assess their own patterns. They will then draw up an action plan for improvement.
3 It ain't what you say ...
This activity examines the key non-verbal aspects of listening. By increasing awareness of the vital role played by feedback - for example, facial expressions, body posture, head movements and 'encouraging sounds' - participants will identify ways in which they can use body language to encourage people to talk openly.
4 Bringing down the barriers
There are many things that can act as barriers to communication. During a conversation it is important to be aware of these barriers and seek to minimise them. In this activity, participants identify the barriers and discuss the fact that both parties to a conversation have a responsibility to remove them.
5 Shall we dance?
This activity introduces the concept of building rapport when having a face-to-face conversation. It will look at the way people in rapport match each other's body language. Participants will discover the negative effects of mismatching, and practise matching posture and gestures to gain rapport.
6 Dancing in the dark
This activity looks at the powerful rapport-building effect of matching a talker's pace, even when those talking cannot see each other. Participants will identify whether they are fast, medium or slow paced talkers, and explore how they feel when dealing with someone of a different pace. They will start to develop the skills of speeding up and slowing down when dealing with differently paced talkers.
7 Are you on my wavelength?
This activity introduces participants to the concept of building rapport by matching energy levels. When dealing with emotional people it is often difficult to convince them that you understand how they are feeling. Matching energy levels can make them feel you are tuned in to their problems. Participants will gain insight into how they can match the energy level of an angry, anxious or depressed person without matching the emotion itself.
8 Do you come here often?
This activity introduces open and closed questioning. Open questions encourage the talker to give longer answers. Closed questions invite short answers, and are useful if you need a specific item of information. Participants will discover how to 'chat people up' and 'chat people down'.
9 Colouring in the picture
Often takers are vague and general, when what we need from them is clear, specific information. This activity develops the skill of getting important details from talkers. Participants will use probing questions to draw out the detailed information that they need in order to solve problems.
10 Have I got that straight?
This activity looks at the skill of reflecting back the facts to ensure that information is clearly understood. Participants will learn that it is acceptable to interrupt a talker to clarify factual information, and that this will be welcomed as a sign that they are really listening and trying hard to understand.
11 Let's get technical
In many situations, listeners need to gain clear, precise technical information about procedures or problems. This activity uses the powerful combination of probing questions and reflecting facts to clarify technical details and to make sure that the finer points have not been missed.
12 The music in the message
This activity is designed to help people become more sensitive to hidden emotional messages behind spoken words. Emotions are not always obvious and it is easy to overlook them and consequently fail to deal with the real problem. Participants will practise picking up subtle emotional signals that might contradict the face value of the words that are being spoken.
13 Those uncertain feelings
Talkers are often emotional. Listeners often find it difficult to show empathy because they cannot recognise and name the emotions involved. This activity examines the process of making an empathic response. It looks at the language people use when expressing emotion, and encourages listeners to identify feelings and to name them accurately. Participants will then learn to reflect back feelings and discover the power of empathy.
14 Double act
This activity is for those who have acquired the skills of reflecting back both feelings and facts but still need practice in putting the two together. Participants will work in teams, each using one skill at a time, before learning to use both techniques in a single conversation.
15 I'm going down the garden to eat worms
The way people express anger, fear and sadness varies a great deal. Talkers who are disappointed and scared often express anger. Sometimes angry people burst into tears. Participants will learn to recognise the way they normally express their own bad feelings. They will then discover how to look beneath the surface feelings of others and empathise with whatever lies beneath.
16 Welcome to my world
In this activity, participants will be introduced to the idea that mental representations of the world vary between individuals, and that this knowledge can be used to increase our effectiveness as listeners.
17 Thank you and goodnight
This training activity will help participants identify and practise the skills needed to control a conversation in order to bring it to a successful conclusion.
18 Don’t get hooked
Use this training activity to help participants to increase the self-awareness of listeners so that they will be better able to handle difficult conversations without becoming judgemental or intimidated.
19 The sound of silence
Use this training activity to introduce to participants the concept that silence plays an important part in effective listening and to provide some opportunities for practice.
20 Absolutely positive
Use this training activity to help participants to learn how to move conversations forward by the use of positive words and phrases.
21 The listening toolbox
Use this training activity to introduce a simple three-stage model that will enable participants to select the best listening skills to use at various stages of a conversation.
22 Can I just make a note ...?
Use this training activity to help participants to understand and practise tactics and techniques for taking notes
without compromising the quality of listening.
