Day #268 Persuasiveness and Learning to Listen – Character Development, Week #39

Part of being persuasive is learning to really listen. You can’t have a good side of your argument unless you more thoroughly understand the other side. Further, people have no desire to listen to you if they feel like they have not been heard. Often we spend so much of our “listening time” thinking about what we are going to say next, that we rarely take time to listen like we really should. We rarely take time to get to the heart of what the other person is saying and how they came to that conclusion through their varied life experience. We can in no way respond to people unless we listen to their hearts. Step one in learning to be persuasive is learning to listen, which can feel a bit counter-intuative. We talked about that concept briefly with the girls today and then played a good old game of telephone. I don’t think we were able to get one translation going through correctly with just the four of us (keep in mind we had a three year old playing). That makes it a great opportunity to teach the importance of really be able to listen well and communicate back what another person is saying. This had to be set as the foundation as we entered into our week on persuasiveness.