The Skill Called Listening
14 December 2007Listening is the first language mode that children acquire. It provides a foundation for all aspects of language and cognitive development, and it plays a life-long role in the processes of learning and communication essential to productive participation in life.
Listening - a Master Skill
Listening is rarely taught in schools because educators and almost everyone assume listening is equal to breathing. But effective listening is a skill. Like any other skill, competency in listening is achieved through learning and practice. If you didn’t have good listeners to learn from, you probably didn’t master this skill. Instead, you learned whatever passed for listening in your environment: distracted half-attention, constant interruptions, multi-layered, high-volume, with little listening at all.
Barriers to Listening
Listening takes time or, more accurately, you have to take time to listen. A life programmed with back-to-back commitments offers little leeway for listening. Similarly, a mind constantly buzzing with plans, dreams, schemes and anxieties is difficult to clear. Good listening requires the temporary suspension of all unrelated thoughts. In order to become an effective listener, you have to learn to manage what goes on in your own mind.
A few barriers are
- worry, fear, anger, grief and depression
- individual bias and prejudice
- semantics and language differences
- noise and verbal disorder
Listening Out Loud
A good listener is not just a silent holder, passively receiving the thoughts and feelings of others. To be an effective listener, you must respond with verbal and nonverbal cues which let the speaker know that you are listening and understanding. These responses are called feedback.
Verbal feedback works best when delivered in the form of brief statements, rather than questions. Statements allow you to paraphrase and reflect what you’ve heard, which affirms the speaker’s success at communicating and encourages the speaker to elaborate further or delve more deeply into the topic. Meaningful exchanges are built on feedback.
In order to accurately feed back a person’s thoughts and feelings, you have to be consciously, actively engaged in the process of listening. Hearing a statement, you create a mental model, vicariously experiencing what the speaker is describing, feeling the speaker’s feelings through the filters of your own humanity and experience.
Listening for all
Listening is a precious gift. It helps build relationships, solve problems, ensure understanding, resolve conflicts, and improve accuracy. At work, effective listening means fewer errors and less wasted time. At home, it helps develop resourceful, self-reliant kids who can solve their own problems. Listening builds friendships and careers.
Tips for understanding
- Accept the fact that you are not going to understand everything.
- Stay relaxed when you do not understand, even for a long time.
- Do not translate into your mother tongue
Listen for the general idea of the conversation.
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