The other wants to feel seen and heard!
By employing active listening, you ensure the other person sees that you are interested and listening carefully to what they have to say. Adding the extra dimension of Observational Listening to your active listening skills, you make it easier to get the appropriate depth in your conversation by making the other feel they have been heard and seen. You do this in an authentic way, thereby creating a psychologically safe space where the other is allowed to be vulnerable.
What you will learn in this course:
- Some specific active listening skills:
- Paraphrasing
- Literal reflections
- Reflections of emotion
- Summarizing
- How to maximize these active listening skills by adding the dimension of Observational Listening
- How to help the other feel seen and heard in an authentic way
- How to get to the appropriate depth in your conversations in an almost effortless way.
Let’s do some more Observational Listening!
So in the fifth course we laid some foundations and started honing some of the active listening skills. In this course we continue the journey by broadening the other active listening skills with this extra layer Observational Listening gives them. And to tie everything back to the first two courses, we want to do this to create psychologically safe spaces, where people are allowed to be authentic, feel free to share their expertise and thereby contribute to excellent team perfomance.
Here’s what you’ll learn
Paraphrasing
We start with the paraphrase. This is a way of giving back briefly – in your own words – what you have understood from what the other person just said. This shows you’re listening and makes the other aware of what they are saying.
Literal reflections
You can also give a literal reflection to show you’re listening. You then repeat a word or a few words the other person said in their last sentence.
Reflection of emotion
With a reflection of emotion, you show that you understand the impact of what someone is telling you by mentioning in your own words what feelings you see in what (or how) other person is saying.
Summarizing
The difference between a summary and a paraphrase is that a summary is about a larger part of the conversation. For example, you can use a summary to conclude a topic. You tell the gist of what was said as you have heard it.
Observational Listening
Part and parcel of all the active listening skills is how Observational Listening adds another authentic dimension to these skills, creating a psychologically safe space in which the other feels seen and heard.