How can you develop a growth mindset through active listening?

Active listening opens up your mind to ideas, perceptions and view separate and outside your own mind/circle. This helps you fully engage with new possibilities and backgrounds. This once, I learnt how to use an age old techniques of skill-will matrices to effectively gauge people satisfaction through a friend who spoke about how their company was doing quizzess for everything ! My openness to engage helps cultivates a continuous learning attitude, essential for embracing challenges, learning from failures, and ultimately shaping my leadership towards continous growth.

Without paying attention, you hardly absorb anything to your mind to begin any productive thought process and growth. When you listen actively, you focus on the speaker's words, ask questions to make sure you understand them correctly, and summarize what they said. This way, you can learn from others, respect different views, and communicate better. You can also develop your skills and knowledge by being interested and receptive through active listening.

Actively listening to others unlocks a treasure trove of fresh perspectives. By truly absorbing criticism and feedback, we open ourselves to new ideas and approaches. This fosters a growth mindset, where challenges become stepping stones, propelling us forward in our personal and professional journeys.

Present and Attentive: Engage fully, set aside distractions. Example: During meetings, focus on discussions without multitasking. Open-minded Listening: Example: In team discussions, encourage all members to share perspectives without immediate evaluation. Empathetic Listening: Put yourself in the speaker's shoes. Example: Support colleagues by acknowledging challenges with empathy, fostering a supportive work environment. Curious Listening: Example: In client meetings, seek deeper understanding by asking probing questions and summarizing key points. Action-oriented Listening: Implement feedback promptly, express gratitude. Example: Act on employee suggestions, thanking them for valuable insights.

To promote active listening as a culture and measure for growth , we as leaders must demonstrate attentive listening in conversations, showcasing its value. Many of my training programs begin with a quick focus and simple active listening games like "whispers, word association, give it to me" to kickstart an efficient session. Many people don't know what we mean by listening actively, it helps leaders to set expectations for attentive listening in meetings and discussions. Speak to your HRMS provider to embed chatbots to facilitate active feedback. In huddles, I share instances where active listening led to positive outcomes. A culture shift towards growth is incorporating communication and listening skills in employee performance reviews.

Active listening and growth mindset, easy to say, harder to do consistently when people are busy, distracted, feeling pressure to perform or behave a certain way. What I've found from running countless leadership programs on these topics is you've got to break through people's invisible hurdles that has them focussed on self protection. Often they don't even realise they are operating from a place of fear rather than growth, to the untrained eye they can look similar. 3 quick tips to implement this today: *When you feel compelled to make a statement, ask a question instead, stay curious longer than you would normally *Talk about failures weekly, it normalises it *Ask yourself "what did I learn today?"