Everyone can spot a poor listener but we are less perceptive when assessing our own abilities. Listening is a fundamental requirement of healthy productive relationships, at work and at home. In an increasingly noisy and demanding world we have to put in extra effort to create the mental time and space to listen with genuine attention. The Listening Skills Pocketbook will help you identify your own bad habits. It starts by outlining the benefits to the workplace of good focused listening, before describing what can get in the way of this. At the heart of the book is a helpful section on the many blocks to listening and how best to counter these. You might recognise the very common desire to advise; our impatience to jump in with helpful suggestions stops us from listening. Author Mike Pezet, who has also written the Feedback Pocketbook, is a trained mediator and coach, where he puts his own listening skills to regular use. Paperback, 112 pages
