Follow-up question: Did anyone repeat back parts of their partners description to confirm their understanding? Key communication skills and how to acquire them. A third skill is reflecting (Robertson, 2005). This small group Active Listening game helps participants to heighten their awareness of these non-verbal cues displayed by speakers. The objective of this Active Listening activity is to increase your emotional intelligence by heightening your awareness of emotions that emerge during discussions. Why? Shaikh Muhammad Ali - Islamabad, Pakistan, download our three Positive Communication Exercises (PDF) for free. Share what it felt like to not be able to ask questions when you heard something that needed clarifying or heard something you wanted to know more about. To get started improving your (or your team's, or your student's) communication skills, give these 5 activities a try. Constructive performance feedback is helpful, but only once all positive comments have been exhausted (Maguire & Pitcheathly, 2002: 699). Active listening involves giving the other person time to explore their thoughts and feelings, they should be given adequate time for that. Active listening. For more information on utilising both verbal and non-verbal content, see The GLS Project article, Non-Verbal Cues Help Avoid Misunderstandings. Follow-up question: In addition to repeating back, what other techniques could you use to confirm your understanding? As a result, we have developed a customer centric process for sales. Occasionally, a speaker will say how they feel. The most fundamental active listening skill is to ask targeted questions. Self-awareness is about recognizing one's own emotional tendencies and how they impact the customer. Why might that be? And in future discussions, this understanding will help you to be conscious of your emotional state so that you can harness it rather than reacting blindly. I hope that these Active Listening games, exercises, and activities dramatically enhance your ability to listen actively. They might be up to their ears in work, or their colleagues complaints might seem trivial. Then, let them share the story of what they did with it; When onboarding new people, invite the group to bring in an object which symbolizes their wishes for the new team member. CCSG is a structure, and it involves: C: Characters A conversation of this kind can be quite absorbing. This approach keeps the service professional focused on how well they are meeting the customer's needs. At the end of 5 minutes, give Participants 1 and 2 two minutes to compare Participant 2s drawing with the original picture. A time when I dealt with a difficult conflict well. Avoid industry jargon when appropriate. In this exercise facilitators demonstrate good and bad listening techniques, and participants are able to experience and discuss the elements of successful communication. Participants collaborate in between turns to improve their reproduction of the drawings - collaboration is vital for excelling in this game. Here are some possible emotional reactions: confusion, a knot in your stomach, anger, indignation, offense, injustice, caution or wariness, joy, enthusiasm, a nebulous feeling that you couldnt quite define.. What would you talk about? Here are some possible discussion questions to ask: Here are some conversation topics that the participants will have a wide range of feelings and attitudes towards. We hope you enjoyed reading this article. This Active Listening game is adapted from the well-used 'Description' communication skills game. Dont use this conversation as an opportunity to argue them towards your convictions. Instruct the role-player of the scenario to "get into" their role and not to just read their role to their partner. So, plush toys, tennis balls, or similarbut the more imaginative they are, the better. And as more than one collective intelligence researcher has pointed out, teams are more than the sum of their parts (Woolley et al., 2010). And then listen. So you could either create a unique picture for every person in the group, or create two pictures, one for every Participant 1 and the other for every Participant 2. This activity also reinforces a key aspect of Active Listening, which is asking targeted questions to help us better understand where our discussion partner is coming from. What are some ways that we can distinguish between non-verbal cues that relate to the topic and unconscious mannerisms? Write the topics on separate pieces of paper. Introduce concentric circle exercise. Remember that you're not obliged to agree with them. Identify someone who has a belief that is different to your own. Its a cognitive limitation of the way our brains are wired. One person can be the difficult customer and the other the customer service rep, then they can switch roles. Poor listening results in misunderstandings. Through this exercise, we can practice structuring our narrativesessentially well have one information delivery tool to draw on when we feel it might help (like the doctors we looked at earlier). The mime reads the card, then attempts to act out whats on it (youll first need to decide on a theme, like weather, activities, or what have you). Whats noise and whats a message? How about a chance to blow off some steam and get that empathetic listening ear at the same time? In EURAM Conference, Munich, Germany. How could these be applied in real-life interactions? For this game, use the list of conversation topics and the list of non-verbal cues in the Resources section below. The doctors studied also checked with their patients what their beliefs were about what was wrong. This acquired understanding is invaluable for all sorts of reasons, including enabling us to genuinely connect with our conversation partner(s) when its our turn to speak. In a small paragraph, it should outline whats gone wrong (maybe its everything from a cracked smartphone screen to a delay during your commute). Follow-up question: What could you have done to overcome any differences in understanding? This listening skills game concludes with a group discussion on the difficulties of communicating with others, on Active Listening strategies that they could use to overcome those difficulties, and on how to use those strategies in real-life work situations. To practice active listening and assertive communication. Odom, R. Y., Boxx, W. R., & Dunn, M. G. (1990). When someone repeats or interrupts another group member, they start again from one. Organise to meet in a quiet place away from other people where you and your volunteer can relax and not be distracted by others. Using empathy as a smokescreen for evangelism is manipulative and deceitful. Depaulo, B. M., & Friedman, H. S. (1998). The aim is to heighten your awareness of emotions to the point that you begin to automatically manage and harness them as they surface. Psychological safety, trust, and learning in organizations: A group-level lens. What are some key things to be aware of when we give or listen to instructions? Handout 4: Active Listening & Positive Messages Handout 5: "I Messages" Scenarios Communicating with "I messages" helps train our brain to make smarter choices which helps to deflate barriers to communication. But because the way we get along is so fundamental to organizational success and human flourishing, many more companies are focusing on the latter. It is simply amazing. Who had the biggest impact on the person you have become? When the words we speak convey one message and our body another, we risk confusion and potentially, we jeopardize our intended impact. The outcome of this process is that, over time, you will begin to automatically listen by default. In a non-active listening situation, there may be quick back and forth, many rapid questions, or people may talk over one another. What is the strangest dream you have ever had? Here are two activities that will help your team work together creatively to solve a problem, as well as one about the role of silence. So, a 6-person group will make a 6-frame strip, and so forth. Paraphrase in your own words the main points that you think you heard the speaker say - they should remain quiet while you're paraphrasing. An animated or subdued gesture that conveys an emotion. Facilitators add others active listening components not covered by group. Organizational cultures, commitment, satisfaction, and cohesion. Whiteboard, blackboard or butchers paper Subscribe to the newsletter for new resources every month. The participants are divided into groups of 5. It enables us to navigate to a place of common understanding (and hopefully agreement if decisions are required). [1]. In other workplaces, team situations call for claritya shared goal is the ideal, but very often we come at situations with at least a few different beliefs. Listen With Empathy, Non-Verbal Cues Help Avoid Misunderstandings. Once people get the gist of how to play with one item, the facilitator adds in the second by passing it to the left. Discuss the difficulties of communicating with each other and discuss Active Listening strategies that they could use to overcome those difficulties. Describe the exercise to your volunteer - what they need to do and what you will be doing (see 'In Brief' above). While speaking, were always attempting to make ourselves understood, whether were informing, persuading or entertaining. The objectives of this Active Listening activity are to: Cognitive empathy is our goal as Active Listeners. What did you find the toughest about this activity? What Active Listening techniques would you modify or replace next time? Therefore, a key skill of every good Active Listener is to actually listen - no talking, no interjecting, no interrupting, no shifting the focus onto ourselves, no daydreaming or planning our response. The relative effectiveness of active listening in initial interactions. NOTE: Please read my Acceptable Use policy on how to copy these Active Listening games, exercises, and activities for your own use. Dont interrupt or try to share your beliefs. Deadlines, role boundaries, budgets, and the why, how, what of tasks. Different studies vary on exactly how much of our intended message (and credibility) is non-verbal, but its undoubtedly important (DePaulo & Friedman, 1998; Knapp et al., 2013). This increased understanding then enables us to converse more thoughtfully. The talker discusses their dream vacation for three minutes, describing what they would like best about it but without specifying where it should be. How much were you influenced by the other pairs? Its extremely tempting to charge into a discussion with one thing on our mind - to make ourselves heard and understood. This exercise introduces I statements, which describe others behavior objectively while allowing the speaker to express the impact on their feelings. Discuss how the speaker felt to have your full attention. We gather insights from working with cutting edge startups and corporations in Silicon Valley and apply it for all our clients. Both verbal and non-verbal content, see the GLS Project article, non-verbal cues Help Avoid Misunderstandings or similarbut more..., how, what other techniques could you have done to overcome differences. 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