LISTENING – IMPORTANT PUBLIC SPEAKING & LEADERSHIP SKILLS


While some may be impressed with how well you speak, the right people will be impressed with how well you listen. Great leaders are great listeners, and therefore my message today is a simple one – talk less and listen more. The best leaders are proactive, strategic, and intuitive listeners.

Listen not hear

Everyone wants to be heard and understood, but at one time or another most people don't listen and fail to understand the meaning of another person's words. It’s a fundamental human need to have your feelings acknowledged, whether or not someone agrees with you. Honest to goodness listening creates an intimate connection and makes you feel cared about.
You can hear someone speak without listening to the words. Hearing is an involuntary process that starts with noise, vibrations, the movement of fluid in the ears and sound sent to the brain. Simple!

Where it gets a little complicated is when the noise actually arrives to its final destination: the brain! This is where listening happens. Listening goes far beyond your natural hearing process. It means paying attention to the words that are being spoken with the intention of understanding the other person. Your personal perceptions and prejudices can affect the quality of your listening skills.

A good listener understands that communication is a two-way street. He refrains from interrupting a speaker with his own thoughts. Good listening also requires keeping an open mind, refraining from judgment and making direct eye contact. Finally, a good listener will not glance up at the clock or look down at his watch while the other person is speaking.

Public Speakers Need to Be Good Listeners

When a public speaker sets out to create his speech, he first do some research about the audience. The best way for doing research and gaining information about the potential audience is by asking open ended question, the questions that requires elaborate answers, and then listen to the answers. By listening to the responses he can make out many things about the background of the audience, this will help him to set the focus of the presentation

Also, he speaker should get to the gig early. It will give him time to socialize with the audience. As he peruses the crowd, he may stumble upon something interesting something personal bout the audiences, which may help to give a personal touch to the speech

During the speech, we should be “listening” the audience, taking cue from their responses and body movement. This sounds difficult but is not, Listen to the laughs, sneer or whispering. This will tell you whether the speech is holding the audience. You may have to take some decision on the fly gauging the response.


In the next blog we will be discussion on the tips of improving listening and stop hearing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

STORY TELLING – AN ENGAGING WAY FOR PRESENTATION – PART 1

Image
In order to garner audience attention public speaker needs to take them on a journey, leaving them feeling inspired and motivated. They need to structure their speech to get the ideas across; keeping the audience engaged all the way, which is a very tricky proposition.  Story telling is one of the most exciting way to put across your ideas Why Story telling You are doing a presentation, so the natural tendency is to start with facts and figures highlighting the facts you want to get across. We think that s the best way. WRONG!! Humans are hardwired for stories. They love heroes, journeys, surprises, layers and happy sometimes tragic endings. Deliver a presentation that captures the hearts and heads of the audience by taking them alongside the journey. Deliver the facts and figures disguised in the story. The moment they start relating to the story, you will have their unconditional attention. They biggest question public speakers face is – HOW? Here I would be detailing few
Read more

IMPORTANCE OF BODY LANGUAGE IN PUBLIC SPEAKING - TOASTMASTER PROJECT 5

Importance Of Body Language Many people who give speeches don’t realize the importance of body language and nonverbal communication. The truth is that people will see you before they hear you speak, and how they see you influence how they hear you. If we are trying to make a good impression – both socially and in business – we often smile and hold contact the other person’s eyes as we shake their hand. The difficulty is that we give off thousands of other unconscious signals through our body language that other people will ‘read’ instantly and instinctively. By shaking their hand or standing in a particular way, we might trigger off old memories in the person we are trying to impress. Maybe an old friend stood exactly like that, in which case our advances might be treated sympathetically. But if we stand like the back-stabbing colleague who has treated them badly, our advances are likely to be treated as hostile. Body Language is all the non-verbal communication we ma
Read more

ICE BREAKER SPEECH - TIPS AND IDEAS

Image
Objective According to dictionary “Icebreaker” is a special-purpose ship or boat designed to move and  navigate through ice-covered waters” and “for a ship to be considered an icebreaker, it requires three traits most normal ships lack: a strengthened hull, an ice-clearing shape, and the power to push through ice-covered waters”.  In real world Ice Breaker is a term which describes an activity which reduces tension and anxiety in a group. Thus, it is fitting that the first Toastmaster speech project is titled "The Ice Breaker". This speech requires willingness to make mistakes and learn from them, courage to speak in front of a group and eagerness to kill the fear of speaking. The Aim The Ice Breaker speech has three aims: Introduce yourself.    Your ice breaker speech topic is you – anything and everything about you can be the topic for example your life, your job, your hobbies, your interests, your family, or any combination of these. You are t
Read more