LISTENING

What is listening? 

Listening is an active process of receiving aural stimulus. Listening is an active rather than a passive process.  Listening does not just happen we must make it happen. A great time is spent on listening and talking. Listening serve two purposes in its process.

1. As the sender of the message, listening to your receiver tells you how the other person has interpreted   your message
2. As the receiver of a message listening to the other person allows you to understand their meaning.

Listening

• Difference between hearing and listening
• Hearing is a physical process. The ear receive stimuli or sensations and transmit them to brain
• Listening refers to the interpretive process that takes place when we hear something. When we listen, tore ,classify and label information
• Listening is the most important of all the communication skills. Upon awakening we listen to people, friends around us. Wherever we go, we listen to something. We spend most of our time engaged in listening. Listening occupies more time than any other communication.

Purpose of listening 

Listening serves a number of important purposes. It enables the listener to check on the accuracy of understanding what the speaker said. Besides, the listener expresses acceptance of speaker’s feelings. Most important of all, listening provides a chance to the speaker to explore his or her feelings and thoughts further.
A variety of listening skills can be learned and developed with practice. The following skills are worth practicing
• Attending listening
• Encouraging listening
• Pause
• Reflecting listening
• Active listening

Attending listening

In attending listening you focus on speaker by giving them your physical attention you use whole body, eye contact posture personal space in short complete feedback.

Encouraging listening

It invites speaker to say more without pressuring them to disclose their feelings or though it is their choice.

Minimal and brief responses 

Brief spoken responses let speaker know you are listening and encourage them to talk.

Pause 

Brief pause allows speaker time to consider reflect and decide whether to continue speaking. Allow silence.
Use encouraging questions (5ws)

Reflecting listening

Restate the speakers feeling and contents it shows the other person you understand.

Active Listening

An active listener has empathy with the speaker that shows that you understand the issue from other person’ point of view. Feedback is the connecting continuing or completing link.

Faults in listening

Remember that every sound or voice that we receive cannot be termed as listening. There are certain occasions when you receive some certain sound stimulus but you do not understand it because your attention is towards something else.  In such cases, we say that you heard something but you did not listen to anything.  Moreover there are certain other factors which bar our proper listening.  An average person remembers only half of what is said during a 10-minute conversation and forgets half of that within 48 hours.  Studies agree that listening efficiency is no better than 28 to 30 percent. Following are the causes of listening pit falls:

Prejudice

All of us have personal opinions, attitudes, or beliefs about certain things. When we listen to a speaker who is contrary to our ideas, we cannot maintain attention. As a result we do not listen to whatever he says. We should give a chance to the speaker to finish his message. Later, we can agree or disagree.

Distraction

Not only the verbal messages but also the nonverbal cues of the speaker affect our listening. Actually, the entire physical environment affects listening. Among the negative factors are noisy fan, poor light, distracting background music, bang of a horn, extreme weather. Among the speaker’s nonverbal cues are his clothes, his voice quality, his wearing of a certain perfume, reek of sweat, excessive gestures, etc.

 Semantic barrier

Meaning of words also create problem in listening, as meaning of words vary from person to person influenced by feelings, attitudes, prejudices and biases. Sometimes the way a speaker utters a word annoys us.

Preshrinking

The average thinking capacity of a person is up to 800 words per minute while the average speaker utters 80 to 160 words per minute. This difference sometimes makes listeners deviate from the speaker’s words and they shift to something else. On the other hand people fill this gap by premature evaluation of what they are listening to. They arrive at the concluding thought quickly. This premature evaluation poses us our effective listening is impaired.
• .Boredom or lack of interest
• Listener’s dislike of speaker
• desire to change rather then accept the speaker
• Tendency to make early conclusion
• Intrusion of listeners’ own values or attitude
• Listener’s opinion that the speaker lacks credibility Ways to improve listening

Ways to Improve your Listening

(1) Be prepared. By knowing the speaker and the topic beforehand you can prepare yourself for better understanding of the topic.
(2) Show positive attitude. Don’t make premature assumptions before listening to a certain speaker.
Always be ready to learn new ideas or facts that you are not aware of.
(3) Listen to learn, not to refute. While listening, try to understand the points. Don’t let them mix up with your biases before you have listened and evaluated the message.
(4) Concentrate. Pay attention to what is said. You know that everything that is said has a special meaning in a certain context. Out of the context it may be misunderstood.
(5) Jot down notes. If possible, take down main ideas. These notes will help you a lot later on.