Week 3 Tip of the Day: Listen to others with compassion. Do you recognize the needs of others? Do you make others feel important or appreciated? Take time to listen attentively to others, use positive language, praise people in writing and be committed to others.
Quotes:
- You have to be willing sometimes to listen to some remarkable bad opinions. Because if you say to someone, ‘That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard; get on out of here!’—then you’ll never get anything out of that person again, and you might as well have a puppet on a string or a robot. John Bryan
- An essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one’s own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker’s world from the inside, step in inside his or her shoes. This unification of speaker and listener is actually and extension and enlargement of ourselves, and new knowledge is always gained from this. Moreover, since true listening involves bracketing, a setting aside of the self, it also temporarily involves a total acceptance of the other. Sensing this acceptance, the speaker will fell less and less vulnerable and more and more inclined to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. As this happens, speaker and listener begin to appreciate each other more and more, and the duet dance of love is begun again. M. Scott Peck
- June Rokoff, Senior VP for Software Development at Lotus credits her success in turning around the company’s position in the software industry to building a team that listens: she made listening to the culture of her team.