Adjustment with right people is always better than argument with wrong people.
Adjustment with right people is always better than argument with wrong people.
“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” — Stephen Covey
Listening is a skill and you can get better with practice.
But why get better at listening?
Skilled listening can help you connect with others, learn faster, win friends, and influence people.
If you want to improve your personal effectiveness, learn how to listen with skill.
Stephen Covey often said that communication is the most important skill in life. He also said that empathic listening is the most important communication skill. So many people in this world, just want to feel heard.
The good news is that you can dramatically improve your listening skills by learning the listening process, the listening types, and the listening styles.
You can also practice specific things to be a better active listener, critical listener, and empathic listener.
To be a better listener, you need to know the listening process.
While there are lots of variations of the listening process, I think the listening process from A Primer on Communication Studies to be pretty simple and effective.
Here is a summary of the listening process:
As you review the listening process, you can probably start to see areas where you can improve, or where you can apply
To be a better listener, you need to know the types of listening you can do. The type of listening you do can vary by the situation or context.
According to Kittie Watson, Larry Barker, and James Weaver, there are four key listening types: discriminative listening, informational listening, critical listening, and empathetic listening.
Here is a summary of each of the types of listening according to A Primer on Communication Studies:
You might naturally be better at one type of listening than another. This is your chance to identify what type of listening you need to work on and improve.
To be a better listener, you need to know the styles of listening that you and others use. You can think of them as listening personalities, or listening preferences, or listening styles.
You can generally categorize people as one or more of the following listeners: people-oriented listener, action-oriented listener, content-oriented listener, and time-oriented listener.
Here is a summary of each type of listener according to A Primer on Communication Studies:
To contrast action-oriented with time-oriented listeners, action-oriented listeners are less likely to cut people off. Action-oriented listeners don’t mind taking longer to reach a conclusion when it’s a complex topic, or when they need to hear more details that are relevant to reaching a decision.
If you know somebody’s listening preference, you can better understand where they are coming from, and you can better adapt and speak to their needs.
Speaking of needs, Dr. Rick Kirschner (Dr. K) identified four communication needs:
If somebody needs to hear action, tell them the action you’ll take. If somebody needs to hear accuracy, elaborate with details. If somebody needs to hear approval, then speak in a friendly, indirect, and considerate way. If somebody needs to hear appreciation, then speak directly, with energy and enthusiasm.
There’s a big difference between speech and thought processing rate, which means that a listener’s level of attention can vary a great deal while receiving a message.
Effective listeners work to maintain their focus as much as possible, and when it shifts or fades they refocus their attention.
A simple way is to identify intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for listening to a particular message.
You can prime yourself to be a more effective listener by asking yourself the following questions:
Owen Hargie suggests three ways to use internal dialogue to become a better active listener:
You can also use the “extra” channels in your mind to “re-sort, rephrase, and repeat” what a speaker says. Re-sorting can help better organize information, rephrasing can help you put things into your own words that fit better with your cognitive preferences, and you can repeat to help transfer a message from short-term to long-term memory.
According to A Primer on Communication Studies, you can also use mental bracketing which refers to the process of intentionally separating out thoughts that distract you from listening. And you can use mnemonic devices to help you with information recall. For example, you can create acronyms, rhymes, or visualizations.
Being a good active listener really comes down to focusing your attention, reducing distractions, and giving verbal and nonverbal feedback to the speaker that indicate you are fully engaged.
As a critical listener, you evaluate the credibility, completeness, and worth of a message. According to James J. Floyd, some listening scholars say that critical listening is the deepest level of listening.
Critical listening skills include the ability to distinguish between facts and inferences, evaluating supporting evidence, discovering your own biases, and listening beyond the message.
Facts are widely agreed-on conclusions, and they are getting easier to check with online resources. Inferences are tougher to evaluate because they are based on unverifiable sources.
That said, you can check the strength of an inference by asking the following question:
“What led you to think this?”
To check the sources of inferences, ask the following questions:
To discover your own biases, ask the following questions:
To think beyond the message, ask the following questions:
You can also rephrase the last question and direct it toward the speaker:
“What is your goal in this interaction?”
Empathetic listening is listening until the other person “feels” heard. For empathetic listening to be effective, you need to be open to subjectivity and you need to genuinely see it as worthwhile.
To be an effective empathetic listener, you need to suspend or suppress judgment of the other person or their message so that you can fully attend to both.
Paraphrase to be a better empathetic listener. This helps put the other person’s words into your frame of experience without making it about you. Paraphrasing can also help you invoke the feelings within you, that the other person felt when they were saying their words.
Mirror to help you be a more effective empathetic listener. Mirroring is replicating the speaker’s physiology and nonverbal signals. This can help you feel how the speaker is feeling.
One of the most important things to learn about listening is the variety of listening styles and listening types that other people are using.
It’s easy to assume other people listen the way we do.
Instead, you can learn how other people are listening and adapt your approach.
The more adaptable you are, the more power you have to choose your response in any situation.
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