Listening is essential for winning arguments - or you can't counter their arguments. Listening enables you to "win" a negotiation, by discovering what the othe

Listening is essential for winning arguments - or you can't counter their arguments. Listening enables you to "win" a negotiation, by discovering what the other party values, that you might be able to give them. It's predicated on the reality of negotiation, that it's with another person with free-will and autonomy, who will only give you what you want if it makes sense from their perspective. So helps to know what theirs is. Communication cannot occur without listening. And not just by the "recipient": you need to determine if communication has been successful, or if error correction is required. Words mean different things to different people, in different contexts. The better you understand the other party, the better chance you have of communication. A preliminaries can be helpful to align contexts (get "on the same page"), and then have purpose/concerns understood.