Active Listening for Beginners

In this lesson, you’ll meet the hero of our story, Agile Adventurer Ana. You’ll learn why she wants to learn active listening, and the outcomes she’s hoping for. You also get a free bonus – your own Active Listening Self-Assessment Worksheet. By the end of this lesson, you’ll understand why active listening matters in agile, and the concrete benefits it can bring for you.

You get another free bonus in this lesson - the Active Listening Self-Assessment Worksheet. This is free educational material. You can find it in the downloadable materials for this lesson, or at this link:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FqWeuonS6XaFmVrMuNLCIEVoJygVYTZKiZ0ZctUs594/edit?usp=sharing

In this lesson, we’ll hone in on the core definition of Active Listening. And we’ll follow Agile Adventurer Ana as she explores what this’ll mean for her. By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to do three things:

• State the basic definition of active listening

• Distinguish between active listening and other kinds of listening, and

• Prove your knowledge in a learning interaction on the key points of active listening

In this lesson, you’ll learn the 3 Easy Steps of Active Listening. You’ll also learn a couple easy ways you can start feeling successful at this right away. By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to list the 3 Easy Steps of Active Listening. You’ll also be able to try them out in your real-life situations!

In this lesson, you’ll learn the 4 key benefits of active listening, as we continue to follow Ana’s story. And by the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to identify how the 4 benefits of active listening for agile apply to YOU. To make things practical, you get another bonus: The Active Listening Worksheet. That’s where you’ll fill out the “Why” of active listening for YOU in particular. It’s also a place to record your best hopes for real-life positive outcomes.

In this lesson, you’ll learn about how setting a goal, then telling someone about it, can make a huge difference in your ability to accomplish it. We’ll continue to follow the story of Agile Adventurer Ana. We’ll find out who she chooses to tell… and what happens. By the end of this lesson, you’ll have a new tool around agile goal setting and accountability buddies, to help you succeed at active listening, whether in your agile practice or in general!

In this lesson, you’ll become able to move beyond just conceptual understanding, to actually acquiring the skill. You’ll find that learning Active Listening is more like learning to speak a foreign language or play the piano vs learning to riding a bike.

You can get started right away, and you get better gradually over time with practice. You’ll also get the benefit of a real-life scenario to hear what active listening actually sounds like in an agile setting. By the end of this lesson, you’ll have a simple approach to incrementally acquire the skill over bite-sized practice sessions, whatever situation you’re in: backlog refinement, sprint planning or even an informal conversation!”

In this lesson, you’ll learn the secret to finding out immediately if your active listening was successful. It entails you learning to read body language, so we’ll cover that. When I’ve demo’d this in the past, people think it’s mind reading until I explain what I’m doing.

By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to recognize immediately whether you were successful at active listening. And if you weren’t, you’ll have learned how to do an agile “adjust and adapt.”

In this lesson, you’ll see how Agile Adventurer Ana learns a simple way to practice Active Listening. You’ll follow her story as she uses “The 5-Step Active Listening Practice Checklist.”

By the end of this lesson, you’ll have an easy way to practice your active listening skills, as well as an accessible checklist that keeps you practicing. You’ll also receive a bonus resource in this lesson called “The Practice Triad.”

You can download the PDF guide from the resources area. This will give you a proven practice protocol for skill acquisition, that was developed and battle-tested with thousands of people through the International Coaching Federation.

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to achieve the goal that lots of people want – how to both succeed at active listening and still get your point heard. You’ll learn two new skills to help you achieve that: Acknowledgement, and a fun skill from the world of improvisation called “Yes and.”

By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to have your cake and eat it too!

In this lesson, you’ll learn why listening to both yourself and others strengthens both your agile communication skills and your relationships. You’ll become more able to live up to the first line of the Agile Manifesto, which states, “Individuals and interactions over process and tools.“ You’ll learn two kinds of listening: Level 1 Listening and Level 2 listening; listening to yourself, and listing to others.“

By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to do three things. The first is to get better at listening both to yourself and others. In the world of professional coaching, these are called ‘Level 1 and ‘Level 2 listening.’ “ The second is to understand both the bright sides and dark sides of Level 1 and Level 2 listening. And third, you’ll acquire the skill of noticing which type of listening you’re doing in any given moment, and ways to adjust from the dark side to the bright side.

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to make active listening stick. You’ll see the approaches Ana tried to make active listening stick for her as a skill she can use long-term. By the end of this lesson, you’ll have gained a practical approach to make it stick, and you’ll have a start on your own personal “Make It Stick” plan. That’ll help you get the benefits long-term.”

As you go through this lesson, feel free to be filling out your own “Make It Stick Plan.” You can find it in the materials section for this lesson.

In this lesson, you’ll get a unique opportunity to see a live demo of active listening with a real-life former Marine, Mark Mhley (based in Alexandria, Virginia, USA), and a real-life Scrum Product Owner, Sebastian Hellman (based in Munich, Germany). By the end of this lesson, you’ll have a real sense of how it looks, sounds and feels, as well as an understanding that mistakes are ok.

Congratulations! You’ve now completed the course! What we covered was:

• What active listening is, and why It’s valuable

• How to apply the 3 steps of active listening

• 2 easy tips to gauge your success immediately, and

• One simple tool to make active listening a habit.

We followed the journey of Agile Adventurer Ana. We got to experience how she learned that her colleagues thought she could be a better listener, and what she did about it. You also learned how to apply active listening in your relationships, and practical ways to balance listening to others with listening to yourself and the points you would like to get heard.

Congratulations, and I wish you the very best with Active Listening!

Kelly Fidei, Ph.D. - Instructor