It’s the day after Thanksgiving in November of 2021, and did you know today is National Day of Listening?
One of our basic tenants here at Local Links is that we LISTEN – to you, to our partners, and to our collective community.
We have a little treat for you today – We asked one of our most trusted and stellar partners to join us for a short interview all about listening.
You can find the entire interview as a podcast wherever you listen to them. Here, we’ve pulled out a couple of pieces of the interview that we thought you would especially enjoy…
Welcome to the Local Links podcast. I’m Brian Fife. I’m here with my guest, Sheila Miller-Nelson from Midland LLC. So we’d like to start off by hearing, Sheila, What do you do?
SHEILA MILLER-NELSON, MIDIAN LLC:
Well, Brian, you know how when you’re presenting to a group or maybe giving feedback one on one that your comfort and confidence tend to shrink down?
At Midian, we help you regain control and power over that with customized communication and leadership training. And we work together with our clients to help build meaningful experiential sessions, whether that’s online or in-house, which we are getting back to.
And every session is personalized and it’s interactive, and it provides participants with impactful and implementable actions to take in order to increase their individual capabilities, enhance company culture and ultimately create the highest return on investment for our clients.
I call listening the silent partner in communications.
I will say I’ve never had a client come to me and say, “I would like to be a better listener. Can you help me with that?”
We weave it in, we talk about it, and definitely in my in my company trainings and the things when I have a longer period of time, it’s definitely built into that.
What we need to think about, though, is even if I say, “Hey, I’m giving a speech or I’m giving a talk and I’d like some help with that,” there’s probably going to be a Q&A after that, right?
And even if there isn’t, there’s a portion of listening that we don’t think about. I call it absorbing. It’s absorbing your audience.
So let’s just say that you come to me, Brian, and say, “Hey, I’m going to give a talk. I have 30 minutes and I’m just going to be on stage giving a talk and then I’m done.”
And there’s a Q&A, the listening portion of that for you. As the speaker is listening and absorbing your audience, listening for what they’re NOT saying, right? Because they won’t be verbalizing!
But what ARE they saying, by the way that they’re listening?
Are they are they listening in right? Are they leaning in and that sort of thing? Ore you getting body language that says otherwise?
Are they confused? Because as a speaker, we have the we have the capability then to say, “Hey, it looks like maybe I’m not being as clear as I could be.”
But when it comes to actually listening to what people say, oftentimes we do hear it! I physically hear the words – they land on my ears.
That is not active listening because we hear things all the time that we couldn’t, ten seconds later, repeat, because we didn’t digest them, we didn’t actively listen to them.
So instead of hearing and instead of just listening, Active Listening has the quality of stopping down, paying full attention, and really again absorbing what that person has to say.
What are they saying? What are the words that they’re choosing? How do they say it?
Happy National Day of Listening to all of you! We hope that today you will take a moment to stop and not just HEAR, but LISTEN to each other and the world around you.
For more from Sheila Miller-Nelson or to learn about her company Midian LLC, please visit her online at https://midianllc.com/ .
