Why Active Listening?

Listening is usually identified as a positive personality trait. It can be seen as a virtue and a sign of generosity and wisdom, which may place listeners at high regard in front of other people. Therefore, many individuals may not hesitate to say they are good listeners, but may do so when confessing they are good talkers.

Listening may seem like an easy process, but active or power listening is a specialized skill, which can be acquired through the intentional training of oneself to focus on what is and isn't being said. A Certified Professional Coach practices power listening through actively listening to his clients.

One can enhance their powerful listening skills over time by attempting to increase the number of seconds, for which one can stay focused. One of the ways to practice this skill is through counting to 50 silently. If we can try to maintain our counting progress for that period of time, we have practiced the skill of power listening for almost one minute. Now this may seem like a short amount of time but in a conversation this can be quite a long one.

One of the key areas of becoming a power/ active listener is to determine whether you value this skill or not. If we ask ourselves whether it is important enough to spend much of our time listening to what other people say, and whether anything they say may offer any benefit to our life. Can we really listen to someone if we can't directly see the connection between what they are saying and whether it holds any value to us.

By practicing this powerful skill regularly, we allow it to be part of our conscious thinking process, and we will start to become more aware of how we often listen to others. We may start to observe ourselves in conversations.

Jumping in too early is a guilt trap many people may fall in, but the good news is that we can acquire and develop our skills in listening and trying to understand what the other person is saying and how they are linking things in their own logic.

A good coach is one who listens well, and makes their client feel valued and relieved, through sharing their thoughts and feelings with their coach. That can make clients feel at ease to realize their problems should not take control of them, and that solutions are possible through the voluntary interaction between coach and client.

A good coach disce
s what is truly motivating, triggering and inspiring a client, and becomes part of his joy, sadness, and celebrations. A coach's main focus while listening is to understand what inspires the client and what obstacles stand in the way of realizing this inspiration.

Finally, coaches can try to listen to what the client is not saying, i.e. read between the lines.Non-verbal communication plays a large role in communication. Therefore, not everything we say means what we really want to say.

Active Listening is a skill when refined to a professional level can open the door to a speaker's internal wisdom. Empathy is the window for that interaction between speaker and listener. Therefore, being actively present for their clients, coaches try their best to focus mainly on what their client really wants to say.

Everyone needs a coach, why not try it for yourself.