Communication – a Voyage of Experience: Part 3

The Introduction, Part 1 and Part 2 to this series are available via the links.

Part 3: How Well Do You Listen?

I expect that quite a number of you have been on training courses where you have been told the importance of active listening. You may even have spent 5 minutes listening to a partner and then regurgitating the facts they told you.

This exercise has some merit, but it doesn't cover all the aspects of active listening. These include paying attention not only to the facts but also to:

1. the tone of voice
2. gestures
3. filler words
4. grammar
5. the use of language to create mind pictures
6. the structure and logical flow of the speech

You may not think that you need to pay attention to all these points in all of your everyday conversations and work place reports and interactions. I would suggest that the more you pay attention to these, the more quickly and easily you will be able to understand what is being said to you, and the more you will notice the non-verbal clues that the speaker is sharing.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you mutter, I've heard all this before. I do it all the time.

Do you? How do you know you're doing it effectively? Could you articulate the detail of what you've picked, to a time limit, and make that into a logical speech of its own that is useful to the original speakers?

There are several roles at a Toastmasters meeting that give you the opportunity to develop and hone these skills. Here is a brief description of one of these roles (the others will follow in subsequent blogs).

Ah Counter

The Ah Counter focuses on the speakers' use of filler words – from the simple 'Ah', 'Umm' and 'Er' to the repeating of words and phrases to the overuse of certain conjunctions such as 'and', 'so' and the favourites 'actually', 'kinda' and 'you know'. Obviously.

At the end of the meeting, the Ah Counter will let each speaker know how many filler or crutch words they used and which these words were. This is particularly useful when you favour a certain word – mine was 'and' – as once you know what you use, you can work at avoiding those words.

The aim is for each speaker to eliminate the filler words so that they have a much more polished and powerful presentation. Just as in engineering we often say "if you can't measure it, you can't improve it", so in Toastmasters the adage "if you don't know you say it, you can't remove it" holds true.

In the next blog, the Grammarian's role.

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