Listening and Giving Feedback
The workshop is designed to help people focus on what others mean to say (despite how they say it) and to respond in ways that foster clarity, flow and problem resolution. Through experiential activities like games, role plays, models, and case studies to practise new learnings in a comfortable and enjoyable environment.
Duration: 1 Day
Objectives
After this workshop, the participants will be able to:
- Use ten keys to good active listening
- Assess and improve counterproductive listening habits
- Associate listening strengths and vulnerabilities with personality type
- Read and model appropriate body language while listening
- Encourage people to trust and talk by asking powerful questions
- Indicate understanding through skills like paraphrasing, reflecting and cherry-picking
- Create a conducive communication climate
- Offer appropriate feedback using assertive skills, calming skills, persuasion skills and negotiation
- Use the four-step crediting technique when delivering praise
Outline
- Part 1: Active listening skills
- Focusing on key areas of meaning
- Checking perceptions and assumptions
- Paraphrasing facts, reflecting feelings
- Summarizing
- Non-Specific Encouraging Sounds (NSES)
- Five levels of listening
- Part 2: Identifying and improving dysfunctional listening habits
- Interrupting
- No NSES
- Permitting distraction
- Assuming knowledge
- Blocking
- Culture coding
- Letting emotions think for us
- Part 3: Personality, listening style and nonverbal expression
- How our personality type (and others’) affects our listening ability
- Modelling and observing body language
- The link between feelings and nonverbal expression
- Interpreting changes of facial expression, tension, posture and gesture
- Vocal and verbal cuing
- Developing awareness of our own tells and nonverbal signatures
- Part 4: Asking effective questions
- Open and closed questions as tools for listening
- Linking intent and questioning skills
- The secret of adapting a well-phrased question to a specific purpose
- Other uses of questions
- Part V: Strategies for listening to people in difficult situations
- Bullies, Saboteurs and Exploders
- Clams and Know-it-Alls
- Whiners
- The Child-Parent Trap
- Calming Skills: Keeping our cool
- Decision-making models
- Part 6: Preparing to give feedback
- Communication Models
- Changing reaction to response
- Dealing with ego and hot buttons
- Part 7: Expressing feedback assertively
- Distinguishing aggressiveness, passiveness and assertiveness
- An assertive paradigm
- Listening as a necessary step to giving feedback assertively
- Three steps to assertiveness
- Part 8: Using effective language to give meaningful feedback
- Positive expression: the importance of being constructive
- Avoiding absolute language
- Keeping language “provisional: and not “positional”
- Facilitating phrases for all occasions
- Offering praise using the Four-Step Crediting technique
- Tips in negotiating to Win-Win
- Course Closure and Evaluation