30-Day Listening Challenge Overview
In June 2020 I conducted a 30 Day Listening Challenge on LinkedIn. Each day consisted of a post that contained a simple listening awareness prompt to improve your ability to listen with empathy. Below is an overview of each day and a hyperlink to the original post.
Day 1: Welcome to the Listening Challenge. An introduction to the way listening enriches our lives and creates positive outcomes.
Day 2: Being Present - the Prerequisite to Listening. A mindful practice for being present.
Day 3: The Biggest Roadblock to Listening. An introduction to the internal roadblock - our ego.
Day 4: Overcoming Judgments to Listen. A look into how our judgments prevent us from listening.
Day 5: Overcoming Resistance to Listening. Exploring the role of our attachments and how they block our ability to listen.
Day 6: Listening Calmly in Conflict. Discovering why it's challenging to listen in conflict and how to disarm the desire to fight back.
Day 7 - The original post was a recap of the previous week. Review days 1 - 6. Which day was easier for you? Which day was the most difficult? What new awareness did you gain about yourself and your ability to listen?
Day 8: How to Tap into the Three Levels of Listening. A description of three levels of listening skills Steve Jobs likely utilized.
Day 9: Constructively Listening to Criticism. A new insight into why people criticize (it's not what you think!) and how to listen in a way that meets their needs.
Day 10: Bravely Listening to Others Emotions. Insight into why listening with empathy is more than a buzz word but the gift the world needs right now.
Day 11: Must-Have Goals for Listening. Unpacked why meetings can be hit or miss in terms of success and shared six goals of listening with the power change meeting outcomes.
Day 12: Creating a Positive Listening Experience. Innovation begins and ends with listening to the user. However, all the emphasis is placed on their experience. This post backs up a step to create a positive listening experience.
Day 13: Bringing Your A-game to Listening. We all want to show up with excellence, being at our best, and doing our best work. This post details what that looks like with listening.
Day 14 - The original post was a recap of the previous week. Review days 8 - 13. Which day was easier for you? Which day was the most difficult? What new awareness did you gain about yourself and your ability to listen?
Day 15: Shifting from Losing It to Listening. Do you ever lose your patience or the ability to contain negative emotions? This post is for you.
Day 16: How Leaders Listen to Light Up Others. Employees are diamonds in the rough ready to shine brightly. This post taps into how Leaders can locate the gem within and encourage employees to shine brighter.
Day 17: When Listening Triggers Emotional Pain. The world is in tremendous emotional pain, and our current events reveal what happens when we don't address that pain. How do we even begin to design a future without injustices if we don't fully understand them, their effects on our stakeholders, and our society?
Day 18: Expanding Possibilities through Listening. Stephen Covey once said, "We see the world, not as it is, but as we are──or, as we are conditioned to see it." In this post, we learn how to open to other possibilities by viewing another person's perspective.
Day 19: Listening - The Super Power of Soft Skills. In this post, we share how listening is a foundational skill underneath all 15 soft skills, as identified by Forbes.
Day 20: I AM Listening. I AM the most powerful words you can speak. What falls after them reveals a lot about who you are, your beliefs, and the trajectory of your life. It also tells you a lot when you tune in to others' I AM statements.
Day 21 - The original post was a recap of the previous week. Review days 15 - 21. Which day was easier for you? Which day was the most difficult? What new awareness did you gain about yourself and your ability to listen?
Day 22: Listening in Times of Uncertainty. Life is always sending us lessons, but we often don't hear them. The lessons we don't understand are the ones that stay on repeat until we do. This post shares how to tune into what Life is trying to say to you.
Day 23: Creating Space to Listen. Listening is not easy, and as you've discovered, already, it requires much more than just turning off your cell phone. This post shares what it means to create space to listen.
Day 24: Listening - First Step to Engagement. 85% of employees aren't engaged at work. The fires of crisis leaders put out each day are akin to the Riots of 2020. In this post, we talk about the similarity and how leaders can eliminate these daily fires through listening.
Day 25: When Failure to Listen Boomerangs. Innovative leaders, by nature, are rule-breakers. In this post, we talk about the 10 rules of listening when broken, boomerang back to hit you square in the head. And not in the right way.
Day 26: The Power of Listening to Unlock Your Confidence. Most confidence-boosting advice today is focused on doing activities. In this post, we talk about listening to unleash the power of being to tap into your awesome authentic self.
Day 27: How Leaders Help Employees Release Guilt & Unleash Performance through Listening. When performance lags and spirits have fallen around the office, how do you recognize the guilt that has employees stuck and help them move forward? The answer is in this post.
Day 28 - The original post was a recap of the previous week. Review days 22 - 27. Which day was easier for you? Which day was the most difficult? What new awareness did you gain about yourself and your ability to listen?
Day 29 - How Leaders Listen to Shift Paradigm. Employees in the Industrial Age were considered things to be controlled alongside the equipment. The shift to tapping into the creative potential of the knowledge worker has evolved slowly. This post helps leaders identify the shift.
Day 30 - How Leaders Create Value Through Listening. Tapping into the value of listening to your team to create greater collaboration, greater performance.
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