How to Listen Well

In our society, listening is often overlooked in communication. However, research shows that adults spend about 45% of their time listening, making it the most common communicative activity. In certain contexts, such as work, we spend even more time listening. Listening is crucial for learning new information, which can help us complete tasks at school or work. Listening also supports relational maintenance and helps us meet our relational needs. It can even help us develop an accurate self-concept, which is important for projecting our desired self to others. Improving our listening skills can make us better students, better relational partners, and more successful professionals.

How Listening Occurs

Consider the following situations:

• Scenario 1: You are studying in your room with your headphones on, and your mother suddenly comes in. You take out your headphones and hear her say angrily, "I have been calling your name for the last 5 minutes. Why weren't you listening to me."
• Scenario 2: You are in a lecture, and the teacher asks you to summarize the key point they just made, but although you were paying attention, you can't answer correctly because you didn't understand their main point. Your teacher says, "Why didn't you listen to what I was saying."
• Scenario 3: At the end of your monthly meeting with your advisor, they ask you to summarize the action items the two of you just discussed and agreed on for the next month. However, you realize that you don't remember what the action items are anymore. Your advisor wonders aloud, "were you not listening during our discussion?"
• Scenario 4: You are a huge Ronaldo fan, and your classmate is a massive Messi fan. Every time you discuss football together, they try to convince you that Messi is better, and while you listen patiently to their arguments, you always tell them that you disagree and still think that Ronaldo is better. After the fiftieth time that the two of you have had this argument, they say, "You never listen to me."
• Scenario 5: Your brother keeps borrowing your laptop without asking, so you decide to ignore him for a few days. He comes into your room to ask what you are cooking for dinner. Although you can hear him, you refuse to look at him or speak to him. He gets upset and asks, "Why aren't you listening to me?"

What is going on in each of these scenarios? On the surface, the person you are communicating with has accused you of not listening. But each situation is very different.

• In scenario 1, you never received the message because your headphones blocked you from hearing.
• In scenario 2, you heard the information but didn't understand it well enough to act on what you heard.
• In scenario 3, you heard and understood the information at one point, but when asked to recall it, you could not.
• In scenario 4, you heard and understood the information but evaluated it differently than the speaker intended.
• In scenario 5, you heard and understood the information but refused to respond.

These scenarios point to the reality that listening is far more complicated than we realize!

One common misconception is that hearing = listening. However, this is not the case. Hearing is just one part of listening in which you receive auditory information. However, actual listening requires you to process the information you receive so you can understand and respond to it appropriately.

So, what is Listening?

Listening is the process of receiving, interpreting, recalling, evaluating, and responding to messages. We start listening long before we communicate verbally or nonverbally. After listening for months as infants, we develop our own ways of expression.

📺 Watch the following video for an introduction to listening.

Types of Listening

📺 Watch the video below to learn about 4 types of Listening.

Note: As you watch and listen, take notes of how each type applies to your personal, academic, and professional life.

From the video, we learned that there are four types of listening:

1) Appreciative Listening: Listening to appreciate, like Music and poetry or an inspirational message.

2) Comprehensive Listening: Listening to comprehend and learn.

3) Empathetic Listening: Listening to people’s emotions.

4) Critical Listening: Listening to scrutinize a message.

📺 Watch this video to learn more about comprehensive listening.

📺 Watch this video to learn more about empathetic listening.

📺 Watch this video to learn more about critical listening.

Reflection

❓ In the appropriate column of the padlet below, describe a situation that has required you to use each of the four types of listening described in the videos.

The Process of Listening

Listening is a complex process with cognitive, behavioral, and relational elements that do not occur in a linear, step-by-step fashion. The stages of the process include receiving, interpreting, recalling, evaluating, and responding, but it is important to remember that real-life listening is much more complex and dynamic than any model can capture.

1) Receiving: To listen effectively, we need to take in stimuli through our senses. We return to the receiving stage many times as we process new messages. This part of listening is more physiological than cognitive or relational. We primarily use our auditory and visual channels to take in information, and visual cues from facial expressions and eye contact influence how we interpret messages. Without visual cues in e-mail, text, and phone interactions, it's difficult to read contextual clues into meaning received through only auditory channels.

2) Interpreting: During the interpreting stage of listening, we try to understand visual and auditory information by connecting contextual, informational, and relational cues to our previous experiences using schemata. This engages cognitive and relational processing. The interpreting stage helps us understand the stimuli we have received and attach meaning to it by comparing new information with old information. If we find the new information relevant and credible, we may also update or revise our schemata.

3) Recalling: Our ability to remember information is limited by the way memory works. Our memories are not always accurate and we forget about half of what we hear immediately, 35 percent after eight hours, and 20 percent after a day (Hargie, 2011). Memory is made up of different types of storage units, including sensory storage, short-term memory, working memory, and long-term memory (Hargie, 2011). However, being good at recalling information doesn't necessarily make you a good listener. Some people have great memories and can accurately recount stories from years ago, but this doesn't necessarily mean they were paying attention at the moment. The recall is important to assess listening abilities, but relying on it to test someone's listening skills is not always accurate.

4) Evaluating: When we evaluate something, we make judgments about its credibility, completeness, and worth. We try to determine the degree to which we trust a speaker's remarks are correct and/or true in terms of credibility. In terms of completeness, we try to "read between the lines" and analyze the message in light of what we know about the issue or situation under consideration. We assess a message's worth by making a value judgment about whether we believe the message or idea is good/bad, right/wrong, or desirable/undesirable. All of these components of evaluating necessitate critical thinking abilities, which we do not inherit but must acquire via our own personal and intellectual development.

5) Responding: Responding involves conveying verbal and nonverbal feedback to show attentiveness and understanding or the lack thereof. Verbal cues like "uh-huh," "oh," and "right," along with nonverbal cues such as eye contact, head nods, and leaning forward, serve as positive back-channel cues indicating active listening. Conversely, behaviors like looking away, fidgeting, texting, or turning away suggest a lack of engagement.

Discuss

❓ Based on your experience with listening, which of the steps above do you think is the most challenging? Use the Padlet below to share your response.

Self-Assessment

📝 To develop an action plan to improve your listening skills, use the link below to take the “How Good Are Your Listening Skills” survey linked below, to learn more about how you can develop your listening skills. After you are done, share one area of strength as a Listener and one area for improvement and how you intend to improve it in the Padlet below.

MindTools - How Good Are Your Listening Skills?

Listening Styles

As mentioned in the video at the start of this lesson, there are different styles that people take when listening. These include:

• People-oriented - Focused on offering support and evaluating the emotional state of the speaker.
• Action-oriented - Focused on the plan and what next steps will be needed based on what they are hearing.
• Content-oriented - Focused on listening to complex information and processing it in all of its nuance.
• Time-oriented - Focused on how long an exchange is taking more than they are on any other element of the message.

Source

Reflection

❓ Answer the following questions in the padlet below:

1. Which one (or more) of the listening styles do you use? Why do you think that is?
2. Have you ever used the wrong listening style for a given situation? What was the consequence?