Generous Listening: Part 1

December 3, 2018

TRANSCRIPT

Generous listening is a practice that you can do anytime with anyone and it will improve your relationships and it will build trust. So what is generous listening?

Generous listening is giving your listening to the speaker like a gift. So when we think about communication, we oftentimes think about the importance of speaking and what we're saying, but we don't oftentimes pay attention to how we're listening. In an automatic way, we listen and interpret what the person is saying, and even sometimes we're not listening to what the person is saying at all. We're just listening to this little voice kind of sits on our shoulder and talks to us and interprets what they're saying. And in some cases, we're just thinking about something completely unrelated.

And when we're doing that, we're not giving the speaker our attention.

So think of generous listening like a gift and it's the gift of your attention.

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