Marketable Job Skills: Active Listening and Influencing Others

When you can understand people's words and their reasons for saying them, you can influence them with your own. The capability to truly listen and understand someone's thoughts and feelings can be a marketable skill in your job search. These skills can also help you to perform well in a job. Learning to know your audience and to actively listen are the first steps in acquiring the ability to use words to influence.

Know Your Audience

First, when you know your audience, you can choose your words to speak to its members. Social media is one area where words used in the right way can generate sales leads. If your audience is younger and is more technologically knowledgeable, your social media posts should be short and to the point. Each word should encompass as much emotional meaning as possible.

Active Listening

One of the best ways to improve your ability to use words is to listen. Actively listening begins with holding your opinions and thoughts when someone is talking to you. You also lean forward, look interested and keep your mind focused on what the other person is saying. You build credibility as a listener by repeating what was said back to the speaker to be sure you understood it correctly. (http://www.colorado.edu/conflict/peace/treatment/activel.htm) When you understand their stories, you understand the emotions that are behind the actions expressed in their stories.

On the Job

Listening gives you the tools to understand why people act the way they do. You can then carefully select words for speeches or editorials in the public sphere that have emotionally-charged, connotative meanings can influence the way people think. This can be helpful in the world of politics where speeches are made to influence voters. It could also be important in choosing what to say in a meeting with community members to spread the word of your non-profit's mission.

Once you have begun to master using language to your advantage in the working world, you can get more clients for your business. If you can use words to tell people that your product was made in the United States, for example, by saying, "Made in the USA," you know that people initially think that the product was made in America by Americans. However, the product may really have been only put together on American soil. The parts may have been built in North America, and shipped here for assembly. (http://public.wsu.edu/~taflinge/words.html)

Telling a story is also useful in the field of law. You can persuade a jury with a particular sequence of carefully chosen words. You can also write reports and accounts of incidents that slightly favor one party or the other. You can draw a contract up in such a way that the signer does not really understand exactly what he is signing. You can also use your knowledge of words to write the contract in an easily understandable way. Your accounts can be more objective by tweaking a few words here and there, and your jury address can acknowledge some of the difficulties and pain of the other party without expressing any sympathy towards it.

In a Job Interview

Additionally, listening helps you better understand what employers want to hear. Listen for the qualities and characteristics important to your interviewer in your next job interview. Tailor your answers and examples to demonstrate that you possess them. If part of the job description is to write the company's email newsletter, state that your knowledge of the written word will increase the percentage of newsletters people actually open and read. You might also tell the employer that you understand stories, why they are told and how to use them to build the company's business.

Knowing how to use words to your or an organization's benefit is a useful skill in whatever industry you choose to enter. Employing words to influence, persuade, or to simply create a certain mood is a skill that few have. Effective utilization of words can help you find a job as a speech writer, copy writer, politician, lawyer or salesperson. These are just a few of the many types of jobs you can have in which using words to encourage or promote an idea are required.