By

Sherri Fisher

Become a Listening Master, Step 4: Help The Speaker Feel Heard

Being a skilled listener is an essential step in becoming an excellent listener. But it is not enough. To graduate to the next level of mastery, you must help the speaker feel listened to and understood. It’s not necessarily easy to guide how the speaker experiences your listening. That’s why this more advanced skill is...
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Getting to Graduation: Positive Psychology for Higher-ed Student Retention

By some standards, college attendance in the US is a remarkable success story. After all, nearly 4 out of 5 high school grads will enroll in college within 8 years of their high school graduation. Sadly, retention of these students is quite low. Nearly a quarter of the undergraduates in the United States are placed...
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Become a Listening Master, Step 3: Read The Speaker

To understand what someone is trying to tell you, listening to words alone isn’t enough. Most children communicate with gestures long before they speak. Even as we get older, we continue to communicate mostly through our bodies. I remember my younger cousin Opal watching sign language videos when she was two years old. Opal wasn’t...
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Become a Listening Master, Step 2: Listen to Understand

In the TV show The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Kimmy advises her friend Titus to feign listening to something boring by imagining that the speaker’s mouth and eyes are flipped. Kimmy claims that this makes her appear interested (or morbidly fascinated), but this distracting fantasy certainly does NOT help her to listen! That’s because it’s all...
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Become a Listening Master, Step 1: Intend to Listen

Imagine that you really want to tell someone something that is important to you. Picture telling the whole story to a friend (we’ll call her Gwen) who lets you tell your tale unhurried from beginning to end. Gwen faces you, leaning in and making eye contact, her facial expressions and gestures perfectly responsive to your...
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Be Your Best Bird: Larks & Owls

If you want to make the most of your productive energy each day, you need to know if you are a lark or an owl. Maybe you are a lark – They tend to wake early and their energy is decidedly highest in the morning. Owls on the other hand feel most alive and productive...
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