How To Upgrade Your Listening Skills…

Here’s an extract from VetLed’s recent blog post, written by Jess Woolrich RVN. Jess has a

passion for Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and leads VetLed’s Compassionate

Communication training. In this blog, Jess shares how improving your listening skills can be a

real game-changer for colleague interactions.

As a locum, equipping yourself with these skills could help your shifts run more smoothly,

help you manage challenging conversations with clients, and help you feel part of the team,

while also helping you to communicate your needs openly and honestly.

‘Imagine this; you have woken up on a Monday morning and you go about your day to day

tasks to get ready for work but everything seems to have gone wrong – you are out of

coffee and can’t make your usual wake up drink, you forgot you needed more fuel in your

car, and it puts you behind, and on your journey into work you get stuck behind a tractor for

the majority of the commute. By the time you arrive at work, you are feeling stressed and

cannot wait to let someone know just how difficult your morning has been! You spot a

colleague who often has a sympathetic ear, and you offload your story to them. You finish,

then pause, and the response you get is...

“Have you thought about waking up earlier?”

How do you think you would feel? Frustrated? Annoyed? Grateful?

I think many of us in this scenario would want to be heard and would love the other person

to show that they did hear us. How about if they had responded...

“It sounds like you had a rough morning, where nothing seemed to go right! How about I

make you a coffee?”

How would you feel this time? I imagine that I would feel thankful that someone had heard

what I had to say, even if I still held on to some frustration from the difficult morning.

Why does one response sit differently from another? In each situation, the person did hear

the information shared, but it was the response that differed.’

Interested in learning more about Compassionate Communication? Our next Compassionate

Communication online course starts in February.

Read full Blog