How to Coach Yourself and Others Techniques For Coaching | Page 337
Signs of giving full attention to a person:
Give the speaker your full attention. Stop doing other things.
Eliminate distractions, such as the television. Turn to face the
speaker.
Lean towards the speaker.
Make eye contact with the speaker (unless that would be rude in
your culture or theirs).
Nod or shake your head in response to the speaker's comments.
Make sounds that let the speaker know you are listening, such as
“uh huh,” “yes,” and “go on.”
Change your facial expression to reflect the appropriate emotion,
such as concern excitement, or worry.
Check out what you are hearing. Say, “I think you are saying ...” and
ask if you understand correctly.
Try to figure out what the speaker is feeling and check to see if you
are correct. “You must have felt so excited?” “You sound so sad ...”
Let the other person respond with how she/he is feeling.
Do not interrupt unless time is an issue and you have to be
somewhere else or do something. In that case, apologize and ask to
finish the conversation at another
Happiness Exercise:
When listening to somebody, there’s really nothing else you have to do
other than. The difficulty for most of us is to listen without letting our
minds get distracted by thinking about how we relate to what they’re
saying, a story about ourselves that we want to share, or even our
opinions about what they’re saying.
The exercise is simply to listen with an open mind and hear what the
other person is saying, have attention on their emotions while they’re
saying it, and try to avoid jumping ahead in either their story or your
own. See if you can get attentive enough to feel the tiny shifts in the