The Listening Shift

In organizations, it's a miracle our conversations get us anywhere at all - we are constantly distracted by goals, consumed by the draw of emails, multi-tasking in everything that we do. We rush from meeting to meeting, from call to call. We don't take breaks and we work on the move. Even our downtime is stimulated - videos, social media, noise. We spend about 80% of our day involved in communicating and at least half of that should be listening and yet only 2% of people have ever had any formal training in how to listen. This book supports leaders by showing them how to cut through the noise and listen expertly. It is a constructive toolkit for raising the game in communication with strategies, tools and techniques to implement with confidence. Discover: How to find out how people are feeling. How to set up different modalities of listening in your business How to determine what kind of listener you want to be. How to implement practical tools - using short, medium and longer-term strategies. How to help others listen to you more fully. In a world of remote working, where we need to acknowledge different and minority voices, and where leaders are juggling uncertainty with so many challenges to solve, expertise in listening and communicating in a way that supports listening are more important than ever. The Listening Shift provides the tools you need to create a listening environment where colleagues feel heard and acknowledged, and yet they understand clearly how to move forward.
About the Author: Janie van Hool understands both speaking and listening profoundly. She began her career as a professional actor, training at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before embarking on 12 years of work in the theatre, in TV, as a voiceover artist and conference presenter. She went on to gain an MA in Voice and then an MSc in Performance Psychology. The combination of her academic research together with her experience as a performer has given her a unique perspective on how to articulate messages with confidence and skill, and informed her work as a coach, advisor and skills teacher to business leaders. Over the last 20 years she has developed leaders in a wide range of organizations, from mining in Australia to investment banking in New York and everything in between. She has crafted tactics, strategies, frameworks and tools to enable leaders to inspire others through impact, influence, presentation, storytelling and connection. Her fascination with how people communicate has helped countless leaders make a difference to themselves personally, and to the people they lead. More recently she has volunteered as a listener with Samaritans - a UK charity dedicated to listening to people in distress. This has helped her complete the circle of communication insights that have been her life's work, by recognizing fully the incredible power of being heard.