I thought I’d do something fun this week instead of a regular written blog and that’s to give you the listening quiz I give in many of my workshops.

I didn’t invent the quiz, and can’t find out who did (but I thank the person!) It’s not only fun, but illustrates how ineffective our listening skills are when we don’t close the communication loop by asking questions, paraphrasing what we’ve heard, or asking people to repeat what they’ve said when we don’t understand.

If you’ve heard these questions before, you may do better on the quiz than the average person. However, for those of you who haven’t, you’ll likely get fewer than 5 questions right. You’ll see, after you get the answers to the quiz, that there’s two big problems at play when most of us are attempting to listen. The first thing is what I’ve stated above, we can’t or won’t take the time to verify what we’ve heard. The second reason is our natural inclination to jump to conclusions, stereotype, selectively listen, and other bad habits we have, that cause us to make major mistakes in our listening.

So let’s see how you do.

Before you start the video and take this quick, 10-question listening quiz, be sure to grab a pen and a piece of paper so you can write down your answers.

https://youtu.be/7P77us-DTok