Page 231 - Project+

thereby retain more of the information being presented.

Making eye contact with the speaker is another effective listening tool. This lets the
speaker know you are paying attention to what they’re saying and are interested.

Put your speaker at ease by letting them know beforehand that you’re interested in
what they’re going to talk about and that you’re looking forward to hearing what
they have to say. While they’re speaking, nod your head, smile, or make comments
when and if appropriate to let the speaker know you understand the message. If you

don’t understand something and are in the proper setting, ask clarifying questions.

Another great trick that works well in lots of situations is to recap what the speaker
said in your own words and tell it back to them. Start with something like this, “Let
me make sure I understand you correctly, you’re saying…,” and ask the speaker to
confirm that you did understand them correctly.

Interrupting others while they are talking is impolite. Interrupting is a way of
telling the speaker that you aren’t really listening and you’re more interested in
telling them what you have to say than listening to them. Interrupting gets the

other person off-track, they might forget their point, and it might even make them
angry. However, there is a time and a place where an occasional interruption is
needed. For example, if you’re in a project status meeting and someone wants to
take the meeting off course, sometimes the only way to get the meeting back on
track is to interrupt them. You can do this politely. Start first by saying the person’s
name to get their attention. Then let them know that you’d be happy to talk with

them about their topic outside of the meeting or add it to the agenda for the next
status meeting if it’s something everyone needs to hear.

Methods of Communicating

In ancient times, there were a couple of ways of communicating. The primary method
was verbal. You talked to your neighbors and others in town to get the latest news. You

also made sure you talked to those traveling through from other towns so you could
hear the news from other parts of the world.

Written forms of communication were not prevalent until after the invention of the
printing press around 1450. Before then, scribes hand wrote information onto papyrus,
and before that, pictures were carved and painted onto cave walls. This was an effective
form of communicating for those who had access to the cave. But if you couldn’t get to
the cave, you had to rely on verbal communications.

Today’s technology has brought us dozens of communication methods. I’ll touch on a
few of them after first getting a little deeper into the advantages of written and verbal
communications.

Forms of Communicating

231