Lessons In Leadership: Active Listening

Are you getting the most out of your interactions with others? Are you hearing what's being said, or just preparing your response as the other person speaks? Active listening creates an environment that invites an open exchange of ideas. However, we need to cultivate skills for the most effective listening and lead by example in order to get the most out of our conversations.

There are three levels of listening:

• Internal listening is where you're not actually listening at all. You're silent, and you're giving the speaker your attention, but you are thinking about an email you need to send or a client you haven't reached out to in a while or a thousand other things. Everyone has been guilty of this kind of listening at some point, and we need to train ourselves out of it.