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Welcome to this week’s episode of the HRDQ-U In Review podcast, where we bring you the latest insights and practical tools for enhancing soft skills training in your organization. This podcast is brought to you by HRDQU.com, and I’m your host, Sarah, Learning Events Manager at HRDQ-U. Today, I have Patti Massullo joining me to discuss the webinar, Unlock Better Communication with Learning to Listen. Patti, thanks for joining me today. Well, thank you, Sarah. I’m happy to be here.

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I’m Patti, you are an HRDQ consultant. So you’re part of the team here, but I’d love for you to tell our audience a little bit about who you are and what you do. Sure. Well, I do professional and personal development. I speak and train. I work with lots of different organizations and schools, and I’m also a certified disc trainer. Great. Yes. So if you’re interested in, you know, we’ll be getting a little bit into the content of

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the webinar that we presented a couple weeks ago on the HRDQ product. And if you’re interested in connecting with Patti some more, can let us know over at HRDQ and we can do that for you. So Patti, listening is such a fundamental skill, yet it’s often underdeveloped. Can you share what some common barriers are to effective listening and how did this demo help address them? Sure. Well, first of all, one of the ways that it helps address it is

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is by taking an assessment to learn your learning style, right? So some of the common barriers that we all face are any kind of distractions, whether they’re external or internal, that can be just totally being preoccupied. It can be noise in the background, technology. We also have assumptions. We prejudge and sometimes we have biases that we don’t realize. And then there’s emotional barriers as well. So…

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That can be something personal. can be a fear of conflict or something like that. We just have common differences. Sometimes they can be things like a language barrier or a cultural barrier. All these kinds of things can get in the way of us being able to be good listeners. So the demo teaches us to be active listeners. And basically what that means is just to listen, to understand and not to respond and not to just wait for the next word that we want to say, right? So.

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You’ll work together to share ideas and resources towards different common goals in the demo. And during our product demo, we’re talking about the Learning to Listen product that’s available at HRDQ store. And you talk about how Learning to Listen focuses on assessing listening styles. How can understanding our personal listening style improve workplace communication? Yeah, sure.

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Well, first of all, people want to feel valued, right? They want to feel like they’re heard in all areas, not just in the workplace, but especially in the workplace. And it’s all about being self-aware. So the assessment helps us to work through areas that might need attention, you know, and things like it’ll help prevent employee burnout. It boosts productivity. And it just basically overall encourages open communication between coworkers and…

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supervisors and their subordinates and those kind of things. And in your work, what’s one surprising insight about listening that participants typically learn from using the Learning to Listen product? Sure, yes. That is the fact that we listen at 450 words a minute, but we speak at 125 to about 175 words a minute.

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So the listener thinks faster than the speaker thinks. Basically 45 % of communication is listening and 30 % is speaking. basically what that means is that two things. First of all, the listener has to be an active listener. They have to be aware of what the speaker’s trying to say. And then the speaker has to keep the audience engaged as well.

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You know, effective listening, it’s not just about understanding others, but also fostering collaboration. So how does learning to listen help teams build stronger connections through better listening? Sure. Yes. Well, they work together towards a common goal, right? So to do things like solving issues and different concerns that might come up, there’s higher engagement. builds trust and it just, you know, they collaborate to basically have that positive work culture.

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in a nutshell. And if someone wanted to start improving their listening skills today, there were so many tips and tricks and just great, you know, feedback that you were sharing during our product demo. What’s a quick tip or exercise that someone could implement today to improve their listening skills? Sure. Well, they could do this at home. They could practice with family and friends or they could do it at work. But one thing is to ask yourself,

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you know, how often do I find myself multitasking when someone’s talking to me? We would all, we’re all surprised if we really, really put our thinking caps on and think about that. know I am much more aware of it now. And sometimes we’re looking at the computer or we’re taking notes or we’re thinking about what we’re going to have for lunch. We’re multitasking while we’re, someone is talking to us. And then the other thing is, is how often do we interrupt someone when they’re speaking to us? We stop and you know, quickly.

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get our two cents in and we don’t give them a chance to even finish their thought. So those are just some quick tips that we can implement right away and practice even at home to see if those are things, if we’re becoming good listeners or not. Yeah. And today’s day and age, think most of us probably multitask. It’s almost hard not to. It definitely has to be a discipline that we work on. And if there was one key takeaway that you hope participants would remember from learning to listen, what would that be?

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I think probably that would be that listening is a learned skill, but it’s totally worth learning because both professionally and personally, it changes the way we communicate with other people. And I think that at the end of the day, we all want to learn how to communicate better. so just realizing that learning is a, I mean, listening is a learned skill. For me, that was a huge eye opener because, you you may think of listening as we just sit and listen to people and we don’t really have to pay attention.

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But we really do have to learn how to be skilled listeners. And I think that that is something that was a key takeaway, especially for me, even when I was learning the material myself. Absolutely. And we will have all the information on the Learning to Listen product linked below so that you can check that out. If you’d like to hear more from Patti as well, can reach out to us at HRDQ so that we can get you set up with her too. And with that,

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Patti, I will let you go. Thank you so much for your time today and for sharing more on the learning to listen topic. Thank you, Sarah. And we hope you enjoy listening to the HRDQ- U In Review podcast, available on all major streaming platforms. If you did enjoy today’s episode, make sure to give us a follow and leave us a five-star review. That’s how we’re able to produce this weekly free content for you. Thank you all for tuning into this week’s episode of the HRDQ-U In Review podcast, brought to you by HRDQU.com.