Are you a good listener?

Listen with your ears, your eyes, and every pore in between. Listening is absolutely fundamental to all interpersonal activities. It’s also an essential negotiation skill that gives you a leg up in all kinds of situations. Good listening skills can change your business life and your personal life. How many women have left their husbands with the basic complaint, “He never listened to me?” In your personal life, failing to listen leads your partner to feel unimportant, ignored, and unloved. In your business life, not listening leads to failed deals, bad deals, and no deals. Listening is fundamental to every negotiation. Often, it’s the first skill invoked in a negotiation. When someone approaches you personally or professionally and seeks your acquiescence, approval, or action, that starts a negotiation. You may not have anticipated a negotiation, but now you have no choice.
All you can do is listen.
Listening pays off. At its simplest, listening is accurately taking in all the information that the other party is communicating. Active listening involves all the senses and many screening devices. At its most sophisticated, listening also involves getting the other party to open up, to communicate more information, and to express ideas more clearly than is the norm for that person. You may find that the other person opens up merely because he or she realizes that someone is truly listening.
Often, people who describe their marital breakup as something they “didn’t expect,” “didn’t know was coming,” or “didn’t have any clue about” were simply not listening very well. If you’ve made one of these statements after the breakup of a relationship, try to make a list of signals, signposts, events, and comments that may have foreshadowed the breakup. If you had listened to (and heeded) those early indicators, the relationship may have turned out differently. Fortunately, listening is something you can master. Start practicing right away.