William Ury and The Power of Listening

• William Ury is one of the world's leading experts on negotiation and mediation. He is the co-founder of Harvard's Program on Negotiation. And he is the author, along with Roger Fisher, of Getting to Yes, the world's best selling book on negotiation.  Watch and listen to his Ted Talk on The Power of Listening at the link below.

Bill Ury talks about why it is so important to listen in any negotiation or conflict:

• It helps us understand the other side -- how can you possibly change someone else’s mind if you don’t know where his or her mind is? 
• It helps us connect with the other human being -- it helps us build rapport, it builds trust, it shows we care. After all, everybody wants to be heard.
• It makes it more likely that the other person is going to listen to us -- it helps us get to “yes.” 

He asks: So if listening is so useful, why isn’t everyone doing it?  "The real problem is that there is so much going on in our minds, so much noise and distraction that we don’t have the mental and emotional space to be able to truly listen to the other side."

He says: if we listened more, what difference would it make in the world?  "I believe it would make a huge difference. In the course of my mediation work, I personally witnessed the enormous cost of conflict, the broken relationships, the broken families, the stressed out workplaces, the ruinous lawsuits, and the senseless wars. What always strikes me is the biggest opportunity that we have actually, is to prevent these conflicts even before they start. How do we do that? It’s not easy, but it almost always starts with one simple step. Listening."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saXfavo1OQo

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