In the entrepreneurial community, some businesses meet wild success, while others flop. The ones that flop tend to focus too much on the product or service they’re offering. While the ones that flourish listen to their customers.
Listening has become so vital to the business world. Truly listening.
Of course your goal in business is to make money. And, that objective is easier to reach when you actively listen to your client’s point of view.
We are already pre-programmed to listen in a certain way that involves deletion, distortion and generalization.
Deletion occurs when we selectively pay attention to certain aspects of our experience and not others. We then overlook or omit others. Without deletion, we would be faced with much too much information to handle with our conscious mind.
Distortion occurs when we make shifts in our experience of sensory data by making misrepresentations of reality. In Eastern philosophy there is a well-known story of distortion in the rope versus snake analogy. A man walking along the road sees what he believes to be a snake and yells “snake.” However, upon arriving at that place he is relieved as he discovers that what he sees is really only a piece of rope.
Distortion also helps us in the process of motivating ourselves. The process of motivation occurs when we actually distort the material that has come into us that has been changed by one of our filtering systems.
Generalization is where we draw global conclusions based on one or two experiences. At its best, generalization is one of the ways that we learn, by taking the information we have and drawing broad conclusions about the meaning of the effect of those conclusions.
Then, we filter information based on our values, how we decide whether something is good or bad, right or wrong. How we feel about our actions. They are attractions or repulsions in life. A deep unconscious belief system about what’s important.
In a study of communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 1970, the researchers determined that in communication, 7 % of what we communicate is the result of the words that we say. 38% of our communication to others is a result of our verbal behavior which includes tone of voice, tempo and volume. 55 % of our communication to others is a result of our nonverbal communication, our body posture, breathing, skin color and our movement. (Steve Linder, Strategic Brain NLP Reference Manual)
So next time you meet with a client, try to listen actively. Be conscious of these outside factors and get really in tune to what they’re looking for and want.
Let us know what happened in your next conversation by using these tools, in the comments below. If you can do this, you’ve already taken the first step toward even greater success.
Much Success!
Have an outstanding day!
Sara