THE IMPORTANCE OF LISTENING

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THE IMPORTANCE OF LISTENING

Listening is an active process by which we make sense of, assess, and respond to what we hear.

Objective

Define active listening and list the five stages of the listening process

Key Points

• The listening process involves five stages: receiving, understanding, evaluating, remembering, and responding.
• Active listening is a particular communication technique that requires the listener to provide feedback on what he or she hears to the speaker.
• Three main degrees of active listening are repeating, paraphrasing, and reflecting.

Key Terms

• Listening: The active process by which we make sense of, assess, and respond to what we hear.
• Active listening: A particular communication technique that requires the listener to provide feedback on what he or she hears to the speaker.

Listening Is More than Just Hearing

Learning to Listen: Antony Gormley’s statue “Untitled [Listening],” Maygrove Peace Park

Listening is a skill of critical significance in all aspects of our lives–from maintaining our personal relationships, to getting our jobs done, to taking notes in class, to figuring out which bus to take to the airport. Regardless of how we’re engaged with listening, it’s important to understand that listening involves more than just hearing the words that are directed at us. Listening is an active process by which we make sense of, assess, and respond to what we hear.

The listening process involves five stages: receiving, understanding, evaluating, remembering, and responding. These stages will be discussed in more detail in later sections. Basically, an effective listener must hear and identify the speech sounds directed toward them, understand the message of those sounds, critically evaluate or assess that message, remember what’s been said, and respond (either verbally or nonverbally) to information they’ve received.

Effectively engaging with all five stages of the listening process lets us best gather the information we need from the world around us.

Active Listening

Active listening is a particular communication technique that requires the listener to provide feedback on what he or she hears to the speaker, by way of restating or paraphrasing what they have heard in their own words. The goal of this repetition is to confirm what the listener has heard and to confirm the understanding of both parties. The ability to actively listen demonstrates sincerity, and that nothing is being assumed or taken for granted. Active listening is most often used to improve personal relationships, reduce misunderstanding and conflicts, strengthen cooperation, and foster understanding.

When engaging with a particular speaker, a listener can use several degrees of active listening, each resulting in a different quality of communication with the speaker. This active listening chart shows three main degrees of listening: repeating, paraphrasing, and reflecting.

1 What are Employability Skills?

In the world of work employers often look for skills that go beyond qualifications and experience to retain candidates for a job.

Whilst education and experience may make one eligible to apply for a job, “soft skills” or “employability skills” are very useful to give the necessary advantage for retention on a job in the wide market space.

As a general rule, employers are not only willing to teach someone the job-specific skills required for machine and/or computer operation. Nevertheless, they also want to see the employee better equipped with other ‘soft or employability skills’ before hiring.

Employability skills are the building blocks of any career. The business world, public and private companies spend a lot of time and money on training and development with respect to basic life-learning skills.

In times of growing unemployment, there are many more job-seekers on the market and employers are, therefore, bound to enlist those with better employability skills.

2 Nuturing Employability skills

Nurturing employability skills is a long-term process and are meant to be continuously improved.

Being able to apply for a job in the right way and shine in an interview is not the only key to employability.

Creating a strong CV or résumé, writing a good covering letter and responding well during an interview, are also how one portrays one’s employability skills to employers.

The most important employability skills are:

Working well with other people, i.e, good communication and interpersonal skills;

Being reliable and dependable;

Committing to learn new skills for job improvement.

2.1 Working well with other people

The skills required to work well with other people are known as interpersonal skills.

Good interpersonal skills enable effective participation as a member of a team, boosts up customer satisfaction and expectations, help to negotiate, make decisions and solve problems with other employees. Good interpersonal skills allow people to understand better and create greater synergy between colleagues and clients, thus leading to a better and less stressful working environment.

There are a range of areas covered by interpersonal skills, including:

Communication skills - these are the skills required to transmit or receive messages accurately to and from other people by speaking or in writing, without misunderstandings. These skills include:

Verbal Communication – or the words that we use, whether face-to-face or in writing. The balance between face-to-face and in writing is likely to vary in different jobs, but few, if any, will not want at least some of each type of communication;

Non-verbal Communication –  or what we communicate without words, for example through body language, tone of voice, or even emojis; and

Listening – how we take in and then interpret the verbal and non-verbal messages sent by others, including in writing.

Emotional intelligence – or the ability to understand and manage one’s own and others’ emotions, and use them positively to achieve the desired outcomes.

Teamwork – the ability to work with others in groups and teams, both formal and informal. Not everyone is required to work in a close-knit team, but the ability to function well in a group is a vital skill in most jobs.

Negotiation – these skills relate to finding mutually agreeable solutions to problems or situations through persuasion and sharing of experiences.

Conflict solving – or the skills required to resolve disagreements in a positive way.

Problem-solving – or the skills needed to work effectively with others to identify, define and solve problems, including making decisions about the best course of action.

2.2 Being Reliable and Dependable

Being reliable and dependable means, basically, doing what you say. It also, however, means being able to look around and see what needs to be done. This requires a wide range of skills, mostly personal rather than interpersonal.

First of all, doing what you say means managing one’s time effectively. Time management is very important during this phase of skills development and one must know how to make it simple.

Being reliable also means being trustworthy and conscientious. For example, this might mean not leaving work when things still need doing. Trustworthiness and conscientiousness are both parts of self-regulation and self-management, which in turn is an important part of emotional intelligence.

People who are self-regulated and reliable take responsibility for their own actions and ensure that they live up to their values. They keep track of deadlines and deliver to them without needing to be chased up.

The final element of being reliable is using one’s initiative to identify where work needs to be done. Daniel Goleman, who developed the concept of emotional intelligence, identified initiative as a key part of self-motivation. He defined it as ‘readiness to act on opportunities’. To develop one’s ability to use one’s initiative, one must harness the powers of creative thinking.

2.3 A Willingness to Learn

A willingness to learn means being open to new ideas and experiences, and always looking to improve your skills and knowledge. Sometimes, this is referred to as personal development, but that term is also used for a more formal process, of goal-setting, action and reflection. Whether one chooses to make one’s learning process formal or informal, there is no question that the modern world requires people to continually update and revise their skills.

However, change is a constant in most workplaces, and the most valuable employees are those who are not resistant to change, and those who reckon that change offers more opportunities than threats.

3 Concluding remarks

There are, inevitably, a wide range of skills that may be useful to employers. Every individual has his own personal range of skills and he can make a unique contribution to any organisation. Learning to recognise and use his skills appropriately is essential to growth and development. An open mind and a willingness to embrace new ideas are probably the most useful attributes an individual can bring to the organisation.

Degrees of Active Listening: There are several degrees of active listening.

Active listening can also involve paying attention to the speaker’s behavior and body language. Having the ability to interpret a person’s body language lets the listener develop a more accurate understanding of the speaker’s message.

Listening and Critical Thinking

Critical thinking skills are essential and connected to the ability to listen effectively and process the information that one hears.

Learning Objective

Illustrate the relationship between critical thinking and listening

Points to consider

• Critical thinking is the process by which people qualitatively and quantitatively assess the information they accumulate.
• Critical thinking skills include observation, interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation, and metacognition.
• The concepts and principles of critical thinking can be applied to any context or case, including the process of listening.
• Effective listening lets people collect information in a way that promotes critical thinking and successful communication.

Key Terms

• Critical thinking: The process by which people qualitatively and quantitatively assess the information they have accumulated.
• Metacognition: “Cognition about cognition”, or “knowing about knowing. ” It can take many forms, including knowledge about when and how to use particular strategies for learning or for problem solving.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is the process by which people qualitatively and quantitatively assess the information they have accumulated, and how they in turn use that information to solve problems and forge new patterns of understanding. Critical thinking clarifies goals, examines assumptions, discerns hidden values, evaluates evidence, accomplishes actions, and assesses conclusions.

Critical thinking has many practical applications, such as formulating a workable solution to a complex personal problem, deliberating in a group setting about what course of action to take, or analyzing the assumptions and methods used in arriving at a scientific hypothesis. People use critical thinking to solve complex math problems or compare prices at the grocery store. It is a process that informs all aspects of one’s daily life, not just the time spent taking a class or writing an essay.

Critical thinking is imperative to effective communication, and thus, public speaking.

Who are critical thinkers?

Critical thinkers are those who are able to do the following:

• Recognize problems and find workable solutions to those problems
• Understand the importance of prioritization in the hierarchy of problem solving tasks
• Gather relevant information
• Read between the lines by recognizing what is not said or stated
• Use language clearly, efficiently, and with efficacy
• Interpret data and form conclusions based on that data
• Determine the presence of lack of logical relationships
• Make sound conclusions and/or generalizations based on given data
• Test conclusions and generalizations
• Reconstruct one’s patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience
• Render accurate judgments about specific things and qualities in everyday life

Therefore, critical thinkers must engage in highly active listening to further their critical thinking skills. People can use critical thinking skills to understand, interpret, and assess what they hear in order to formulate appropriate reactions or responses. These skills allow people to organize the information that they hear, understand its context or relevance, recognize unstated assumptions, make logical connections between ideas, determine the truth values, and draw conclusions. Conversely, engaging in focused, effective listening also lets people collect information in a way that best promotes critical thinking and, ultimately, successful communication.

Causes of Poor Listening

Listening is negatively affected by low concentration, trying too hard, jumping ahead, and/or focusing on style instead of substance.

• Low concentration can be the result of various psychological or physical situations such as visual or auditory distractions, physical discomfort, inadequate volume, lack of interest in the subject material, stress, or personal bias.
• When listeners give equal weight to everything they hear, it makes it difficult to organize and retain the information they need. When the audience is trying too hard to listen, they often cannot take in the most important information they need.
• Jumping ahead can be detrimental to the listening experience; when listening to a speaker’s message, the audience overlooks aspects of the conversation or makes judgments before all of the information is presented.
• Confirmation bias is the tendency to pick out aspects of a conversation that support one’s own preexisting beliefs and values.
• A flashy speech can actually be more detrimental to the overall success and comprehension of the message because a speech that focuses on style offers little in the way of substance.
• Recognizing obstacles ahead of time can go a long way toward overcoming them.

Furthermore, there are many barriers that can impede effective listening.

The act of “listening” may be affected by barriers that impede the flow of information. These barriers include distractions, an inability to prioritize information, a tendency to assume or judge based on little or no information (i.e., “jumping to conclusions), and general confusion about the topic being discussed. Listening barriers may be psychological (e.g., the listener’s emotions) or physical (e.g., noise and visual distraction).

Low Concentration

Low concentration can result from various psychological or physical situations such as visual or auditory distractions, physical discomfort, inadequate volume, lack of interest in the subject material, stress, or personal bias. Regardless of the cause, when a listener is not paying attention to a speaker’s dialogue, effective communication is significantly diminished. Both listeners and speakers should be aware of these kinds of impediments and work to eliminate or mitigate them.

Poor Judgment

When listening to a speaker’s message, it is common to sometimes overlook aspects of the conversation or make judgments before all of the information is presented. Listeners often engage in confirmation bias, which is the tendency to isolate aspects of a conversation to support one’s own preexisting beliefs and values. This psychological process has a detrimental effect on listening for several reasons.

First, confirmation bias tends to cause listeners to enter the conversation before the speaker finishes her message and, thus, form opinions without first obtaining all pertinent information. Second, confirmation bias detracts from a listener’s ability to make accurate critical assessments. For example, a listener may hear something at the beginning of a speech that arouses a specific emotion. Whether anger, frustration, or anything else, this emotion could have a profound impact on the listener’s perception of the rest of the conversation.

Stages of Listening

The Receiving Stage

The first stage of the listening process is the receiving stage, which involves hearing and attending.

Key Points

• Hearing is the physiological process of registering sound waves as they hit the eardrum.
• Attending is the process of accurately identifying particular sounds we hear as words.
• Attending also involves being able to discern breaks between words, or speech segmentation.

The Challenges of Reception

Listeners are often bombarded with a variety of auditory stimuli all at once, so they must differentiate which of those stimuli are speech sounds and which are not. Effective listening involves being able to focus in on speech sounds while disregarding other noise. For instance, a train passenger that hears the captain’s voice over the loudspeaker understands that the captain is speaking, then deciphers what the captain is saying despite other voices in the cabin. Another example is trying to listen to a friend tell a story while walking down a busy street. In order to best listen to what she’s saying, the listener needs to ignore the ambient street sounds.

Attending also involves being able to discern human speech, also known as “speech segmentation. “¹ Identifying auditory stimuli as speech but not being able to break those speech sounds down into sentences and words would be a failure of the listening process. Discerning speech segmentation can be a more difficult activity when the listener is faced with an unfamiliar language.

The Understanding Stage

The understanding stage is the stage during which the listener determines the context and meanings of the words that are heard.

Learning Objectives

Define the understanding stage of the listening process

• The understanding stage is the second stage in the listening process.
• Determining the context and meaning of each word is essential to understanding a sentence.
• Understanding what we hear is essential to gathering information.
• Asking questions can help a listener better understand a speaker’s message or main point.

Understanding what we hear is a huge part of our everyday lives, particularly in terms of gathering basic information. In the office, people listen to their superiors for instructions about what they are to do. At school, students listen to teachers to learn new ideas. We listen to political candidates give policy speeches in order to determine who will get our vote. But without understanding what we hear, none of this everyday listening would relay any practical information to us.

One tactic for better understanding a speaker’s meaning is to ask questions. Asking questions allows the listener to fill in any holes he or she may have in the mental reconstruction of the speaker’s message.

The Evaluating Stage

The evaluating stage is the listening stage during which the listener critically assesses the information they received from the speaker.

This stage of the listening process is the one during which the listener assesses the information they received, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Evaluating allows the listener to form an opinion of what they heard and, if necessary, to begin developing a response.

During the evaluating stage, the listener determines whether or not the information they heard and understood from the speaker is well constructed or disorganized, biased or unbiased, true or false, significant or insignificant. They also ascertain how and why the speaker has come up with and conveyed the message that they delivered. This may involve considerations of a speaker’s personal or professional motivations and goals.

The Responding Stage

The responding stage is when the listener provides verbal and/or nonverbal reactions to what she hears.

The responding stage is the stage of the listening process wherein the listener provides verbal and/or nonverbal reactions based on short- or long-term memory. Following the remembering stage, a listener can respond to what they hear either verbally or non-verbally. Nonverbal signals can include gestures such as nodding, making eye contact, tapping a pen, fidgeting, scratching or cocking their head, smiling, rolling their eyes, grimacing, or any other body language. These kinds of responses can be displayed purposefully or involuntarily. Responding verbally might involve asking a question, requesting additional information, redirecting or changing the focus of a conversation, cutting off a speaker, or repeating what a speaker has said back to her in order to verify that the received message matches the intended message.

Nonverbal responses like nodding or eye contact allow the listener to communicate their level of interest without interrupting the speaker, thereby preserving the speaker/listener roles. When a listener responds verbally to what they hear and remember—for example, with a question or a comment—the speaker/listener roles are reversed, at least momentarily.

The Remembering Stage

The remembering stage occurs as the listener categorizes and retains the information she’s gathering from the speaker.

Remembering what you hear is key to effective listening.Memory is essential throughout the listening process. Remembering previous information is critical to moving forward.

Because everyone has different memories, the speaker and the listener may attach different meanings to the same statement. In this sense, establishing common ground in terms of context is extremely important, both for listeners and speakers.