There’s listening… and there’s really listening.

Normally when we’re listening to somebody we tend to pay attention to what they are actually saying. We listen to the words, the sentences, the descriptions, the story line, etc. As a result we may have feelings about them and what they are saying. Yet we are really just hearing and responding to a quite superficial level of their full message.

On the other hand some people, and especially those who have had a thorough training in NLP, will ‘hear’ more. They are also listening for what’s underneath the words, in other words what is going on inside the person doing the talking? How are they really feeling? And this level of information is picked up by paying attention to the implications of their words and phrases and tonalities.

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