Answer these questions to see how accurately you hear what your communication partner intends you to hear, and how much business you are losing as a result.

1. How often do you enter conversations to hear what you want to hear – and disregard the rest?
2. How often do you listen to get your own agenda across, regardless of the needs of the speaker?
3. How often do you have a bias in place before the speaker’s points or agenda are known?
4. Do you ever assume what the speaker wants from you before s/he states it – whether your assumption is accurate or not?
5. How often do you listen merely to confirm you are right…and the other person is wrong?
6. Do you ever enter a conversation without any bias, filters, assumptions, or expectations? What would need to happen for you to enter all conversations with a totally blank slate? Do you have the tools to make that possible?
7. Because your filters, expectations, biases, and assumptions strongly influence how you hear what’s intended, how do you know that your natural hearing skills enable you to achieve everything you might achieve in a conversation?
8. How much business have you lost because of your inability to choose the appropriate modality to hear and interpret through?
9. How many relationships have you lost by driving conversations where you wanted them to be rather than a path of collaboration that would end up someplace surprising?

While writing my new book “What? Did you really say what I think I heard?” I spoke with dozens of people about the way they heard others. Almost to a person, everyone thinks they listen accurately. Ah, but do they hear what’s intended??

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See my new Entrepreneur Programs: Getting Funded; Creating a Selling Machine; Marketing to Buying Decisions

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Sharon Drew Morgen is the NYTimes Business Bestselling author of Selling with Integrity and 7 books how buyers buy. She is the developer of Buying Facilitation® a decision facilitation model used with sales to help buyers facilitate pre-sales buying decision issues. She is a sales visionary who coined the terms Helping Buyers Buy, Buy Cycle, Buying Decision Patterns, Buy Path in 1985, and has been working with sales/marketing for 30 years to influence buying decisions.
More recently, Morgen is the author of What? Did you really say what I think I heard? in which she has coded how we can hear others without bias or misunderstanding, and why there is a gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She is a trainer, consultant, speaker, and inventor, interested in integrity in all business communication. Her learning tools can be purchased: www.didihearyou.com. She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com 512 771-1117
www.didihearyou.com;www.sharondrewmorgen.com

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