Listening is so important that many top employers give regular listening skills training for their employees. This is not surprising when you consider that good listening skills can lead to: better customer satisfaction, greater productivity with fewer mistakes, increased sharing of information that in turn can lead to more creative and innovative work.
Many successful leaders and entrepreneurs credit their success to effective listening skills. Richard Branson frequently quotes listening as one of the main factors behind the success of Virgin. Effective listening is a skill that underpins all positive human relationships, spend some time thinking about and developing your listening skills – they are the building blocks of success.
Listening is a skill of critical significance in all aspects of our lives--from maintaining our personal relationships, to getting our jobs done, to taking notes in class, to figuring out which bus to take to the airport. Regardless of how we 're engaged with listening, it 's important to understand that listening involves more than just hearing the words that are directed at us. Listening is an active process by which we make sense of, assess, and respond to what we hear.
The listening process involves five stages: receiving, understanding, evaluating, remembering, and responding. These stages will be discussed in more detail in later sections. Basically, an effective listener must hear and identify the speech sounds directed toward them, understand the message of those sounds, critically evaluate or assess that message, remember what 's been said, and respond (either verbally or nonverbally) to information they 've
References: http://www.skillsyouneed.com/ips/listening-misconceptions.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Active-listening-chart.png http://www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/ActiveListening.htm http://www.speechclub.com/content/communication-skills/listening-skills/active-listening http://www.infoplease.com/search?q=listening&search=search&fr=iptn http://www.courseindex.com/