How To Know What Your Customers Want
 
You have to listen. But listening involves more than your ears. You have to listen relentlessly. That means you have to listen with all your senses.
 
When you listen relentlessly, using all your senses, your mind and body will be focused on what is being said. You will be tuned in to everything that is being communicated.
 
A message is composed of three elements. There is the spoken words, the tone used, and the facial expression. The greatest part of the message is the facial expression; next is the tone, and finally the words. Therefore, if you not using all your senses, you may be almost entirely missing what is being said.
 
You can practice this type of listening. Go to a mirror. Decide what kind of message you are going to give. Say you want to communicate a happy message. Now, while looking into the mirror make a sad face. Then, communicate your happy message using a sad ‘tone’. Try to be aware of how this looks, how this sounds and how this feels; how genuine or sincere is the message?
 
How do the spoken words come across? By focusing on these elements are you aware of how confused the message becomes? Can you see that despite what is being said that by watching the face and hearing the tone, you are not really receiving a ‘happy’ message?
 
In this exercise you have focused on the facial expression and tone. So you can see that when adding gestures, touch and more, there is so much more to really hearing what someone is telling you that goes beyond the words.