10 Simple Listening Techniques to Improve Your Negotiation Skills–Part 2
Check out part 1 here: Part 1.
We get it, you became a real estate agent because you love to talk. But here’s a nugget of harsh truth: sometimes you have to listen as well. In fact, your entire career depends on your listening skills. Otherwise, how will you understand your clients’ needs and make all those sales? (Hey, at the very least try to pretend to listen.) Here are Florida real estate school Larson Educational Services’ simple listening techniques for effective communication:
- Fight distraction and bad listening conditions.
Have you ever been out with friends and everyone is sitting at the table, faces turned down, with the blue glow of their cell phone illuminating their dead countenance? Don’t be that person. Put your phone on silent and give other people your full attention.
Come on, man. Just talk to the people you’re with.
- Show patience and don’t interrupt.
A pause doesn’t necessarily mean that the speaker is finished talking. Sometimes people are just looking for the right word or articulating their own thoughts to themselves before telling them to you. There are few things more frustrating in a conversation than feeling like you can’t pause for fear of being interrupted. Silence is one of your most underutilized conversational tools.
- Listen between the lines.
If you take everything a person says at face value, then you’ll miss the majority of the information they make available to you. People often (unintentionally) hide their true thoughts or motives in the lines between their words.
- Clarify what you are hearing.
Don’t be afraid to ask the other partner to put their thoughts into other words for your own understanding. While people often find it annoying when they’re interrupted by someone who only wants to talk about themselves, most people don’t mind being interrupted for a clarifying question; it shows that you care.
- Watch for changing tone or volume of the speaker’s voice, facial expressions, gestures, and word emphasis.
These physical changes can signal emotional changes in the speaker’s mind. Pay attention to the conversation points at which these changes happen in order to better understand the speaker’s thought process, even if they are not explicitly telling you what they are thinking.
Picking up on subtle social cues can help improve all of your social interaction
Utilize these simple listening techniques to not only improve your negotiation skills, but also to provide better service to your clients. Check out part 1 here: Part 1.
About Larson Educational Services:
Utilizing 30 years of real estate training and professional education experience, Florida real estate school Larson Educational Services is the premier provider of Florida real estate licensing, exam preparation, post-licensing, CAM licensing, mortgage loan originator licensing, and continuing education in Southwest Florida. Classes are available in Fort Myers, Naples, Sarasota, and online.
Brad Larson
Larson Educational Services
1400 Colonial Blvd. Suite 44
Fort Myers, FL 33907
239-344-7510
Naples Real Estate School 