Shut Up and Listen!

As its subtitle indicates, readers of Shut Up and Listen will quickly master the 10 easy steps that virtually guarantee they will communicate much more effectively. By helping readers develop new and better listening skills – and sharpening whatever skills they already possess – the readers are sure to come away more acutely aware of what other people are actually telling them – or are attempting to hide from them. Taking that same listening process a step further, readers will also discover how to listen more carefully to what comes out of their own mouths, thus making them a much more effective all-round communicator.

Whether you realize it or not, your life – like millions of others – began with you listening. Though none of your other senses had yet developed, your life began by you listening to the reassuring sound of our mother's heart beating. Later, during your nine month of confinement, you began to hear a variety of other sounds, sounds from the world outside of Mom's tummy. Voices, music, all kinds of new and exciting sounds. Later yet, though you didn't always appreciate some of the things they said, you listened to the seemingly endless advice your parents gave you as you were growing up. An apparently inevitable outcome of that growing up process seems to be that you turned off your ability to listen. Well, if not your ability to listen, then certainly to hear what you were being told, to understand the meanings of the thoughts, words and ideas you were presented with every day by friends, family members, teachers, co-workers and, yes, the media. And in losing your ability to listen perceptively, you lost something essential to the way humans communicate. After all, if you don't listen correctly, you're likely not to hear correctly. Or to understand correctly. Or to respond correctly. As someone who earns his living by using words – in front of classrooms, on radio and TV, as an author and as an award-winning copywriter – I had no choice but to learn how to listen – and to listen very carefully – to the people who continue to rely on me for the advice they pay for. Over the course of too many years, I discovered one important thing about listening: I learn more when I listen than when I talk.

Depending on whom you ask, Phil Grisolia is variously described as a serial entrepreneur, a respected educator, a popular author, as well as a highly effective marketing professional. As an entrepreneur, he created a number of companies, not all of them successful. But what he learned from his early failures helped him eliminate mistakes with subsequent start-ups. Those failures and subsequent successes also provided the wealth of experience he continues to draw on when teaching, writing content for various marketing projects, and as an effective business coach. A respected adjunct professor for more than two decades, Grisolia created and taught evening courses in marketing and management to owners of small businesses and those who wanted to be. During three of those years he also produced and hosted an award-winning weekly cable TV series – Do It for Money™ – designed to help viewers start businesses of their own. Two of the several books Grisolia has written – 30 Money-Making Marketing Secrets No One Ever Told You as well as 101 Questions You Must Ask Before You Start Your Business – are available on Amazon.com. A corporate marketing professional most of his adult life, Grisolia is also an award-winning copywriter, an accredited Certified Business Communicator (CBC) and a nationally syndicated business writer. His website contains additional information about his results-oriented marketing skills. Grisolia also donates a portion of his time as a certified SCORE volunteer mentor providing marketing and management advice to start-ups and to owners of troubled businesses.