Chapter 5 Chapter overview

The value of listening skills is often overlooked, but investing our time in improving these skills has plenty of benefits. For most college students, listening makes up over fifty percent of their communication activities. This includes interpersonal listening and listening to media. Research has confirmed that listening is the most important communication skill in the workplace, within families, and socially. Fortunately, listening skills can be improved through instruction and training.

Listening is defined as the process of receiving, interpreting, and responding to spoken and non-verbal messages. Listening requires not just hearing, but the effort of paying attention, understanding, remembering, and responding. Even when we are listening, we often do so mindlessly, reacting to others’ messages routinely and automatically. Mindful listening involves giving careful and thoughtful attention and responses to the messages we receive. There are different styles of listening: task-oriented, relational, analytical, and critical. Effective listening requires that we are able to adapt and adjust our listening style to the needs of the situation.

Listening is not easy. There are many barriers that make listening difficult, including physical and psychological noise, information overload, personal concerns, and rapid thought. Physiological factors, social roles, cultural background, and personal interests and needs all shape and distort what we hear into very different messages. In addition to these challenges, we also engage in non-listening—tactics we use (sometimes unconsciously) that interfere with actual listening. Pseudo-listening is an imitation of actual listening by “pretending” to listen. Stage hogs are interested in expressing their own ideas and listen only to be able to take the “stage.” Selective listeners respond only to parts of a speaker’s message that interest them. People who fill in the gaps add information that was not a part of the original message. Insulated listeners do not pay attention to any messages they would rather not deal with. Defensive listeners take innocent comments as personal attacks. An ambusher will listen carefully in order to use that information to attack what you have to say.

Listening consists of five separate elements: hearing, attending, understanding, remembering, and responding. Each of these elements must be considered in order to be an effective listener. The inclusion of responding demonstrates that communication is transactional. As listeners, we are active participants in a communication transaction. At the same time as we listen to a message, we also send a message back to the sender through our non-verbal and verbal cues.

Responding lets the speaker know that you are listening. Listening responses range from reflective responses that invite the speaker to talk without fear of being judged, to more directive responses that evaluate the speaker’s message. These reflective to directive responses include silent listening, questioning, paraphrasing, empathizing, supporting, analyzing, evaluating, and advising. We use each of these types of listening for various reasons in our communication transaction—to clarify, to send our own message, to draw conclusions, or to direct. Research shows that all response styles have the potential to be used effectively. As a general rule, beginning with responses that are from the left and middle of the continuum of reflective to directive is often a good option. When choosing a style, you should consider the following: match your responses to the nature of the situation, think about the other person to match the style of your response with the type of speaker you are responding to, and think about yourself and your own strengths and weaknesses when deciding how to respond.