essay on the importance of listening

Essay on Listening Skills

Students are often asked to write an essay on Listening Skills in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Listening Skills

Importance of listening skills.

Listening skills are vital in all aspects of life. They help us understand others, learn new things, and build strong relationships.

Types of Listening

There are different types of listening: active, passive, and empathetic. Each type is useful in different situations.

Improving Listening Skills

To improve your listening skills, pay attention, avoid distractions, and show empathy. Practice also plays a key role in enhancing these skills.

Benefits of Good Listening

Good listeners are successful in personal and professional life. They can solve problems, make better decisions, and foster positive connections.

250 Words Essay on Listening Skills

Introduction, the importance of listening skills.

In an academic setting, students with good listening skills tend to excel as they can understand and retain information more effectively. In professional environments, these skills help in building strong relationships, solving problems, and making informed decisions. They are crucial in team collaboration, as they foster understanding and mutual respect among team members.

Improving listening skills requires conscious effort. It begins with giving undivided attention to the speaker, avoiding distractions, and being genuinely interested in the conversation. It also involves practicing patience, not interrupting the speaker, and providing feedback to ensure understanding.

Active Listening

Active listening is a step further. It involves showing empathy, asking relevant questions, and paraphrasing to confirm comprehension. This not only enhances understanding but also makes the speaker feel valued and heard, strengthening the relationship.

In conclusion, listening skills are an essential part of effective communication. They play a crucial role in academic achievement, professional success, and personal relationships. By practicing active listening, we can enhance these skills and improve our interactions with others.

500 Words Essay on Listening Skills

Listening is an integral part of communication, a skill often overlooked in our fast-paced, technology-driven world. It is more than just hearing the words spoken by another person; it involves understanding and interpreting these words in a meaningful way.

The Art of Active Listening

Active listening is a more involved form of listening where the listener not only hears the words but also understands and interprets them. It involves giving feedback, such as nodding or paraphrasing, to show understanding. This kind of listening also requires one to avoid distractions, maintain eye contact, and show empathy towards the speaker. Active listening can lead to better understanding, improved relationships, and more effective communication.

Barriers to Effective Listening

Several barriers can hinder effective listening. These include physical distractions, such as noise or discomfort, and psychological distractions, like preconceived notions or emotional bias. Additionally, cultural differences can also pose a challenge, as they can lead to misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the speaker’s words. Overcoming these barriers requires conscious effort and practice.

1. Practice mindfulness: Mindfulness helps us focus on the present moment, making it easier to concentrate on the speaker’s words without being distracted. 2. Provide feedback: Giving feedback, such as nodding or paraphrasing, can show the speaker that you are actively engaged in the conversation. 3. Ask questions: Asking questions not only shows your interest but also helps to clarify any misunderstandings. 4. Respect cultural differences: Understanding and respecting cultural differences can help avoid misinterpretation and foster better communication.

In conclusion, listening skills are a vital part of effective communication. They require active engagement, understanding, and empathy. By practicing active listening and overcoming the barriers to effective listening, we can improve our communication skills, enhance our relationships, and better understand the world around us. Indeed, the art of listening is a skill that, when mastered, can open a world of possibilities and deeper connections.

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Husband and Wife (detail, 1945) by Milton Avery. Gift of Mr and Mrs Roy R Neuberger. Photo by Allen Phillips/ Wadsworth Atheneum

The art of listening

To listen well is not only a kindness to others but also, as the psychologist carl rogers made clear, a gift to ourselves.

by M M Owen   + BIO

Writing in Esquire magazine in 1935, Ernest Hemingway offered this advice to young writers: ‘When people talk, listen completely… Most people never listen.’ Even though Hemingway was one of my teenage heroes, the realisation crept up on me, somewhere around the age of 25: I am most people. I never listen.

Perhaps never was a little strong – but certainly my listening often occurred through a fog of distraction and self-regard. On my worst days, this could make me a shallow, solipsistic presence. Haltingly, I began to try to reach inside my own mental machinery, marshal my attention differently, listen better. I wasn’t sure what I was doing; but I had crossed paths with a few people who, as a habit, gave others their full attention – and it was powerful. It felt rare, it felt real; I wanted them around.

As a culture, we treat listening as an automatic process about which there is not a lot to say: in the same category as digestion, or blinking. When the concept of listening is addressed at any length, it is in the context of professional communication; something to be honed by leaders and mentors, but a specialisation that everyone else can happily ignore. This neglect is a shame. Listening well, it took me too long to discover, is a sort of magic trick: both parties soften, blossom, they are less alone.

Along the way, I discovered that Carl Rogers, one of the 20th century’s most eminent psychologists, had put a name to this underrated skill: ‘active listening’. And though Rogers’s work was focused initially on the therapeutic setting, he drew no distinction between this and everyday life: ‘Whatever I have learned,’ he wrote, ‘is applicable to all of my human relationships.’ What Rogers learnt was that listening well – which necessarily involves conversing well and questioning well – is one of the most accessible and most powerful forms of connection we have.

T he paucity of my listening powers dawned on me as a byproduct of starting to meditate. This is not to make some claim to faux enlightenment – simply to say that meditation is the practice of noticing what you notice, and meditators tend to carry this mindset beyond the yoga mat, and begin to see their own mind more clearly. Among a smorgasbord of other patterns and quirks, what I saw was a self that, too often, didn’t listen.

The younger me enjoyed conversation. But a low, steady egoism meant that what I really enjoyed was talking. When it was someone else’s turn to talk, the listening could often feel like a chore. I might be passively absorbing whatever was being said – but a greater part of me would be daydreaming, reminiscing, making plans. I had a habit of interrupting, in the rather masculine belief that, whatever others had to say, I could say better for them. Sometimes, I would zone out and tune back in to realise that I’d been asked a question. I had a horrible habit, I saw, of sitting in silent linguistic craftsmanship, shaping my answer for when my turn came around – and only half-listening to what I’d actually be responding to.

The exceptions to this state of affairs, I began to see, were situations where there existed self-interest. If the subject was me, or material that might be of benefit to me, my attention would automatically sharpen. It was very easy to listen to someone explaining what steps I needed to take to ace a test or make some money. It was easy to listen to juicy gossip, particularly of the kind that made me feel fortunate or superior. It was easy to listen to debates on topics where I had a burning desire to be right. It was easy to listen to attractive women.

Bad listening signals to the people around you that you don’t care about them

On bad days, this attentional autopilot constricted me. On topics of politics or philosophy, this made me a bore and a bully. People avoided disagreeing with me on anything, even trivial points, because they knew it would balloon into annoyance and a failure to listen to their reasoning. In my personal life, too often, I could forget to support or lift up those around me. The flipside of not listening is not questioning – because, when you don’t want to listen, the last thing you want to do is trigger the exact scenario in which you are most expected to listen. And so I didn’t ask my friends serious questions often enough. I liked jokes, and I liked gossip; but I’d forget to ask them the real stuff. Or I’d ask them things they’d already told me a week ago. Or forget to ask about their recent job interview or break-up.

This is where bad listening does the most damage: it signals to the people around you that you don’t care about them, or you do but only in a skittish, flickering sort of a way. And so people become wary of opening up, or asking for advice, or leaning on you in the way that we lean on those people we truly believe to be big of heart.

All of the above makes for rather a glum picture, I know. I don’t want to overstate things. I wasn’t a monster. I cared for people and, when I concentrated, I could show it. I was liked, I made my way in the world, I apparently possessed what we call charisma. Plenty of the time, I listened fine. But this may be precisely the point: you can coast along in life as a bad listener. We tend to forgive it, because it’s common.

Kate Murphy, in her book You’re Not Listening (2020), frames modern life as particularly antagonistic to good listening:

[W]e are encouraged to listen to our hearts, listen to our inner voices, and listen to our guts, but rarely are we encouraged to listen carefully and with intent to other people.

Why do we accept bad listening? Because, I think, listening well is hard, and we all know it. Like all forms of self-improvement, breaking this carapace requires intention, and ideally guidance.

W hen I discovered Rogers’s writings on listening, it was confirmation that, in many conversations, I had been getting it all wrong. When listening well, wrote Rogers and his co-author Richard Evans Farson in 1957, the listener ‘does not passively absorb the words which are spoken to him. He actively tries to grasp the facts and the feelings in what he hears, and he tries, by his listening, to help the speaker work out his own problems.’ This was exactly the stance I had only rarely adopted.

Born in 1902 – in the same suburb of Chicago as Hemingway, three years earlier – Rogers had a strict religious upbringing. As a young man, he seemed destined for the ministry. But in 1926, he crossed the road from Union Theological Seminary to Columbia University, and committed himself to psychology. (At this time, psychology was a field so new and so in vogue that, in 1919, during negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles, Sigmund Freud had secretly advised Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador in Paris.)

Rogers’s early work was focused on what were then called ‘delinquent’ children; but, by the 1940s, he was developing a new approach to psychotherapy, which came to be termed ‘humanistic’ and ‘person-centred’. Unlike Freud, Rogers believed that all of us possess ‘strongly positive directional tendencies’. Unhappy people, he believed, were not broken; they were blocked. And as opposed to the then-dominant modes of psychotherapy – psychoanalysis and behaviourism – Rogers believed that a therapist should be less a problem-solver, and more a sort of skilled midwife, drawing out solutions that already existed in the client. All people possess a deep urge to ‘self-actualise’, he believed, and it is the therapist’s job to nurture this urge. They were there to ‘release and strengthen the individual, rather than to intervene in his life’. Key to achieving this goal was careful, focused, ‘active’ listening.

That this perspective doesn’t seem particularly radical today is a testament to Rogers’s legacy. As one of his biographers, David Cohen, writes , Rogers’s therapeutic philosophy ‘has become part of the fabric of therapy’. Today, in the West, many of us believe that going to therapy can be an empowering and positive move, rather than an indicator of crisis or sickness. This shift owes a great deal to Rogers. So too does the expectation that a therapist will allow themselves to enter into our thinking, and express a careful but tangible empathy. Where Freud focused on the mind in isolation, Rogers valued more of a merging of minds – boundaried, but intimate.

On bad days, I would wait hawk-like for things I could correct or belittle

Active listening, for Rogers, was essential to creating the conditions for growth. It was one of the key ingredients in making another person feel less alone, less stuck, and more capable of self-insight.

Rogers held that the basic challenge of listening is this: consciousnesses are isolated from one another, and there are thickets of cognitive noise between them. Cutting through the noise requires effort. Listening well ‘requires that we get inside the speaker, that we grasp, from his point of view , just what it is he is communicating to us.’ This empathic leap is a real effort. It is much easier to judge another’s point of view, analyse it, categorise it. But to put it on, like a mental costume, is very hard. As a teenager, I was a passionate atheist and a passionate Leftist. I saw things as very simple: all believers are gullible, and all conservatives are psychopaths, or at minimum heartless. I could hold to my Manichean view precisely because I had made no effort to grasp anyone else’s viewpoint.

Another of my old mental blocks, also flagged by Rogers, is the instinct that anyone I’m talking to is likely dumber than me. This arrogance is terrible for any attempt at listening, as Rogers recognises: ‘Until we can demonstrate a spirit which genuinely respects the potential worth of an individual,’ he writes, we won’t be good listeners. Previously, on bad days, I would wait hawk-like for things I could correct or belittle. I would look for clues that this person was wrong, and could be made to feel wrong. But as Rogers writes, to listen well, we ‘must create a climate which is neither critical, evaluative, nor moralising’.

‘Our emotions are often our own worst enemies when we try to become listeners,’ he wrote. In short, a great deal of bad listening comes down to lack of self-control. Other people animate us, associations fly, we are pricked by ideas. (This is why we have built careful social systems around not discussing such things as religion or politics at dinner parties.) When I was 21, if someone suggested that some pop music was pretty good, or capitalism had some redeeming features, I was incapable of not reacting. This made it very hard for me to listen to anyone’s opinion but my own. Which is why, Rogers says, one of the first skills to learn is non-intervention. Patience. ‘To listen to oneself,’ he wrote, ‘is a prerequisite to listening to others.’ Here, the analogy with meditation is clear: don’t chase every thought, don’t react to every internal event, stay centred. Today, in conversation, I try to constantly remind myself: only react, only intervene, when invited or when it will obviously be welcome. This takes practice, possibly endless practice.

And when we do intervene, following Rogers, we must resist the ever-present urge to drag the focus of the conversation back to ourselves. Sociologists call this urge ‘the shift response’. When a friend tells me they’d love to visit Thailand, I must resist the selfish pull to leap in with Oh yeah, Thailand is great, I spent Christmas in Koh Lanta once, did I ever tell you about the Muay Thai class I did? Instead, I must stay with them: where exactly do they want to go, and why? Sociologists call this ‘the support response’. To listen well is to step back, keep the focus with someone else.

A nice example of Rogers’s approach, taken from his career, is his experience during the Second World War. Rogers was asked by the US Air Force to assess the psychological health of gunners, among whom morale appeared low. By being patient, and nonjudgmental, and gentle with his attention, Rogers discovered that the gunners had been bottling up one of their chief complaints: they resented civilians. Returning to his hometown and attending a football game, reported one pilot, ‘all that life and gaiety and luxury – it makes you so mad’. Rogers didn’t suggest any drastic intervention, or push any change in view. He recommended that the men be allowed to be honest about their anger, and process it openly, without shame. Their interlocutors, Rogers said, should begin by simply listening to them – for as long as it took, until they were unburdened. Only then should they respond.

Much like meditating, listening in this way takes work. It may take even more work outside the therapy room, in the absence of professional expectation. At all times, for almost all of us, our internal monologue is running, and it is desperate to spill from our brain onto our tongue. Stemming the flow requires intention. This is necessary because, even when we think an intervention is positive, it may be self-centred. We might not feel it, Rogers says, but, typically, when we offer our interpretation or input, ‘we are usually responding to our own needs to see the world in certain ways’. When I first began to observe myself as a listener, I saw how difficult I found it to simply let people finish their sentences. I noticed the infinite wave of impatience on which my attention rode. I noticed the slippery temptation of asking questions that were not really questions at all, but impositions of opinion disguised as questions. The better road, I began to see, was to stay silent. To wait.

The active listener’s job is to simply be there, to focus on ‘thinking with people instead of for or about them’. This thinking with requires listening for what Rogers calls ‘total meaning’. This means registering both the content of what they are saying, and (more subtly) the ‘ feeling or attitude underlying this content’. Often, the feeling is the real thing being expressed, and the content a sort of ventriloquist’s dummy. Capturing this feeling involves real concentration, especially as nonverbal cues – hesitation, mumbling, changes in posture – are crucial. Zone out, half-listen, and the ‘total meaning’ will entirely elude us.

Everyone wants to be listened to. Why else the cliché that people fall in love with their therapists?

And though the bad listener loves to internally multitask while someone else is talking, faking it won’t work. As Rogers writes, people are alert to the mere ‘pretence of interest’, resenting it as ‘empty and sterile’. To sincerely listen means to marshal a mixture of agency, compassion, attention and commitment. This ‘demands practice’, Rogers said, and ‘may require changes in our own basic attitudes’.

Rogers’s theories were developed in a context where one person is attempting, explicitly, to help another person heal and grow. But Rogers was always explicit about the fact that his work was ‘about life’. Of his theories, he said that ‘the same lawfulness governs all human relationships’.

I think I started off from a lower point; by nature, I think my brain tends toward distraction and self-regard. But one would not need to be a bad listener to benefit from Rogers’s ideas. Even someone whose autopilot is an empathetic, interested listener can find much in his work. Rogers did more than anyone else to explore listening, systemise its dynamics, and record his professional explorations.

Certainly, being a good listener had an impact on Rogers’s own life. As another of his biographers, Howard Kirschenbaum, told me, Rogers discovered that ‘listening empathically to others was enormously healing and freeing, in both therapy and other relationships’. At his 80th birthday party, a cabaret was staged in which two Carl Rogers impersonators listened to one another in poses of exaggerated empathy. The well-meaning gag was a compliment; in a somewhat rare case of intellectuals actually embodying the ideas they espouse, Rogers was remembered as an excellent listener by everyone who knew him. Despite the kind of foibles that can weigh down any life – a reliance on alcohol, a frustration with monogamy – Rogers appears to have been a decent man: warm, open, and never cruel.

That he was able to carry his theories into his life should give encouragement, even to those of us who aren’t world-famous psychologists. Everyone wants to be listened to. Why else the cliché that people fall in love with their therapists? Why else does all seduction start with riveted attention? Consider your own experience, and you will likely find a direct correlation between the people you feel love you, and the people who actually listen to the things you say. The people who never ask us a thing are the people we drift away from. The people who listen so hard that they pull new things out of us – who hear things we didn’t even say – are the ones we grab on to for life.

P erhaps above all, Rogers understood the stakes involved in listening well. All of us, when we are our best selves, want to bring growth to the people we choose to give our time to. We want to help them unlock themselves, stand taller, think better. The dynamic may not be as direct as with a therapist; there is more of an equal footing – but when our relationships are healthy, we want those around us to thrive. Listening well, Rogers showed, is the simplest route there. Be with people in the right way, and they become ‘enriched in courage and self-confidence’. They feel the releasing glow of attention, and develop an ‘underlying confidence in themselves’. If we don’t want this for our friends, then we are not their friends.

Indeed, such is the generosity of active listening that one can view the practice as one that borders on the spiritual. Though Rogers traded theology for psychology in his early 20s, he always maintained an interest in spirituality. He enjoyed the work of Søren Kierkegaard , an existentialist Christian; and, over the years, he had public discussions with the theologians Paul Tillich and Martin Buber . In successful therapy sessions, said Rogers, both therapist and client can find themselves in ‘a trance-like feeling’ where ‘there is, to borrow Buber’s phrase, a real “I-Thou” relationship’. Of his relationship to his clients, Rogers said: ‘I would like to go with him on the fearful journey into himself.’

Perhaps this is a bit rich for you; perhaps you would rather frame active listening as simply good manners, or a neat interpersonal hack. The point is: really listening to others might be an act of irrational generosity. People will eat up your attention; it could be hours or years before they ever turn the same attention back on you. Sometimes, joyfully, your listening will yield something new, deliver them somewhere. Sometimes, the person will respond with generosity of their own, and the reciprocity will be powerful. But often, nothing. Only rarely will people notice, let alone thank you, for your efforts. Yet this generosity of attention is what people deserve.

And lest this all sound a bit pious – active listening is not pure altruism. Listening well, as Rogers said, is ‘a growth experience’. It allows us to get the best of others. The carousel of souls is endless. People have deeply felt and fascinating lives, and they can enfranchise us to worlds we would never otherwise know. If we truly listen, we expand our own intelligence, emotional range, and sense that the world remains open to discovery. Active listening is a kindness to others but, as Rogers was always quick to make clear, it is also a gift to ourselves.

Brains learn from other brains, and listening well is the simplest way to draw a thread, open a channel

Rogers became a hero of the 1960s counterculture . He admired their utopian dreams of psychic liberation and uninhibited communication; late in life, he was drawn to the New Age writings of Carlos Castañeda. All of this speaks to one of the key critiques of Rogers’s philosophy, both during his lifetime and today: that he was too optimistic. Rogers recognised himself that he was, in Cohen’s words, ‘incorrigibly positive’. His critics called him a sort of Pollyanna of the mind, and thought him naive for believing that such simple interventions as empathy and listening could trigger transformation in people. (Perhaps certain readers will harbour similar critiques about my own beliefs as expressed here.)

Those inclined to agree with this assessment of Rogers will probably think that I have overstated the case. Listening as love? Listening as spiritual practice? But in my own life, a renewed approach to listening has improved how I relate to others, and I now believe listening is absurdly under-discussed. Good listening is complex, subtle, slippery – but it is also right here, it lives in us, and we can work on it every day. Unlike the abstractions of so much of ethics and so much of philosophy, our listening is there to be honed, every day. Like a muscle, it can be trained. Like an intellect, it can be tested. In the very same moment, it can spur both our own growth and the growth of others. Brains learn from other brains, and listening well is the simplest way to draw a thread, open a channel. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I couldn’t write nonfiction that anyone else actually wanted to read until I began trying to truly listen.

‘The greatest compliment that was ever paid me,’ said Henry David Thoreau, ‘was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.’ Left on autopilot, I can still be a bad listener. I’ll interrupt, finish sentences, chivvy people along. I suspect many of the people I know still find me to be, on balance, an average listener. But I try! With anyone I can impact – and especially those whose souls I can help to light up – I follow Rogers; I offer as much ‘of safety, of warmth, of empathic understanding, as I can genuinely find in myself to give.’ And I open myself to whatever I can learn. I fail in my attentions, again and again. But I tune back in, again and again. I believe it is working.

Sleep and dreams

Spinning the night self

After years of insomnia, I threw off the effort to sleep and embraced the peculiar openness I found in the darkest hours

Annabel Abbs

History of ideas

Philosophy of the people

How two amateur schools pulled a generation of thinkers from the workers and teachers of the 19th-century American Midwest

Joseph M Keegin

Virtues and vices

Make it awkward!

Rather than being a cringey personal failing, awkwardness is a collective rupture – and a chance to rewrite the social script

Alexandra Plakias

Metaphysics

Desperate remedies

In order to make headway on knotty metaphysical problems, philosophers should look to the methods used by scientists

Political philosophy

Citizens and spinning wheels

For Indians to be truly free, Gandhi argued they must take up traditional crafts. Was it a quixotic hope or inspired solution?

Benjamin Studebaker

Psychiatry and psychotherapy

For those who hear voices, the ‘broken brain’ explanation is harmful. Psychiatry must embrace new meaning-making frameworks

Justin Garson

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5 Listening

Introduction

In our sender-oriented society, listening is often overlooked as an important part of the communication process. Yet research shows that adults spend about 45 percent of their time listening, which is more than any other communicative activity. In some contexts, we spend even more time listening than that. On average, workers spend 55 percent of their workday listening, and managers spend about 63 percent of their day listening (Hargie, 2011).

Listening is a primary means through which we learn new information, which can help us meet instrumental needs as we learn things that helps us complete certain tasks at work or school and get things done in general. The act of listening to our relational partners provides support, which is an important part of relational maintenance and helps us meet our relational needs. Listening to what others say about us helps us develop an accurate self-concept, which can help us more strategically communicate for identity needs in order to project to others our desired self. Overall, improving our listening skills can help us be better students, better relational partners, and more successful professionals.

5.1 Understanding How and Why We Listen

The listening process.

Listening is a process and as such does not have a defined start and finish. Like the communication process, listening has cognitive, behavioral, and relational elements. It does not unfold in a linear, systematic fashion. Models of processes are informative in that they help us visualize specific components, but keep in mind that they do not capture the speed, overlapping nature, or overall complexity of the actual process in action. The stages of the listening process are receiving, interpreting, recalling, and responding.

Before we can engage other steps in the listening process, we must take in stimuli through our senses. In any given communication encounter, it is likely that we will return to the receiving stage many times as we process incoming feedback and new messages. This part of the listening process is more physiological than other parts, which include cognitive and relational elements. We primarily take in information needed for listening through auditory and visual channels. Although we do not often think about visual cues as a part of listening, they influence how we interpret messages. For example, seeing a person’s face when we hear their voice allows us to take in nonverbal cues from facial expressions and eye contact. The fact that these visual cues are missing in e-mail, text, and phone interactions presents some difficulties for reading contextual clues into meaning received through only auditory channels.

It is important to consider noise as a factor that influences how we receive messages. Some noise interferes primarily with hearing, which is the physical process of receiving stimuli through internal and external components of the ears and eyes, and some interferes with listening, which is the cognitive process of processing the stimuli taken in during hearing. While hearing leads to listening, they are not the same thing. Environmental noise such as other people talking, the sounds of traffic, and music interfere with the physiological aspects of hearing. Psychological noise like stress and anger interfere primarily with the cognitive processes of listening. We can enhance our ability to receive, and in turn listen, by trying to minimize noise.

Interpreting

During the interpreting stage of listening, we combine the visual and auditory information we receive and try to make meaning out of that information using schemata. The interpreting stage engages cognitive and relational processing as we take in informational, contextual, and relational cues and try to connect them in meaningful ways to previous experiences. It is through the interpreting stage that we may begin to understand the stimuli we have received.

When we understand something, we are able to attach meaning by connecting information to previous experiences. Through the process of comparing new information with old information, we may also update or revise particular schemata if we find the new information relevant and credible. If we have difficulty interpreting information, meaning we do not have previous experience or information in our existing schemata to make sense of it, then it is difficult to transfer the information into our long-term memory for later recall. In situations where understanding the information we receive is not important or is not a goal, this stage may be fairly short or even skipped. After all, we can move something to our long-term memory by repetition and then later recall it without ever having understood it.

Our ability to recall information is dependent on some of the physiological limits of how memory works. Overall, our memories are known to be fallible. We forget about half of what we hear immediately after hearing it, recall 35 percent after eight hours, and recall 20 percent after a day (Hargie, 2011). Our memory consists of multiple “storage units,” including sensory storage, short-term memory, working memory, and long-term memory (Hargie, 2011).

Our sensory storage is very large in terms of capacity but limited in terms of length of storage. We can hold large amounts of unsorted visual information but only for about a tenth of a second. By comparison, we can hold large amounts of unsorted auditory information for longer—up to four seconds. This initial memory storage unit does not provide much use for our study of communication, as these large but quickly expiring chunks of sensory data are primarily used in reactionary and instinctual ways.

As stimuli are organized and interpreted, they make their way to short-term memory where they either expire and are forgotten or are transferred to long-term memory. Short-term memory is a mental storage capability that can retain stimuli for twenty seconds to one minute. Long-term memory is a mental storage capability to which stimuli in short-term memory can be transferred if they are connected to existing schema and in which information can be stored indefinitely (Hargie, 2011). Working memory is a temporarily accessed memory storage space that is activated during times of high cognitive demand. When using working memory, we can temporarily store information and process and use it at the same time. This is different from our typical memory function in that information usually has to make it to long-term memory before we can call it back up to apply to a current situation. People with good working memories are able to keep recent information in mind, process it, and apply it to other incoming information. This can be very useful during high-stress situations. A person in control of a command center like the White House Situation Room should have a good working memory in order to take in, organize, evaluate, and then immediately use new information instead of having to wait for that information to make it to long-term memory and then be retrieved and used.

Although recall is an important part of the listening process, there is not a direct correlation between being good at recalling information and being a good listener. Some people have excellent memories and recall abilities. They can tell you a very accurate story from many years earlier during a situation in which they should actually be listening and not showing off their recall abilities. Recall is an important part of the listening process because it is most often used to assess listening abilities and effectiveness. Many quizzes and tests in school are based on recall and are often used to assess how well students comprehended information presented in class, which is seen as an indication of how well they listened. When recall is our only goal, we excel at it. Experiments have found that people can memorize and later recall a set of faces and names with near 100 percent recall when sitting in a quiet lab and asked to do so. But throw in external noise, more visual stimuli, and multiple contextual influences, and we cannot remember the name of the person we were just introduced to one minute earlier. Even in interpersonal encounters, we rely on recall to test whether or not someone was listening.

Responding entails sending verbal and nonverbal messages that indicate attentiveness and understanding or a lack thereof. From our earlier discussion of the communication model, you may be able to connect this part of the listening process to feedback. Later, we will learn more specifics about how to encode and decode the verbal and nonverbal cues sent during the responding stage, but we all know from experience some signs that indicate whether a person is paying attention and understanding a message or not.

Paraphrasing is a responding behavior that can also show that you understand what was communicated. When you paraphrase information, you rephrase the message into your own words. For example, you might say the following to start a paraphrased response: “What I heard you say was…” or “It seems like you’re saying…” You can also ask clarifying questions to get more information. It is often a good idea to pair a paraphrase with a question to keep a conversation flowing. For example, you might pose the following paraphrase and question pair: “It seems like you believe you were treated unfairly. Is that right?” On the other hand, you might ask a standalone question like “What did your boss do that made you think he was ‘playing favorites?’” Make sure to paraphrase and/or ask questions once a person’s turn is over, because interrupting can also be interpreted as a sign of not listening. Paraphrasing is also a good tool to use in computer-mediated communication, especially since miscommunication can occur due to a lack of nonverbal and other contextual cues.

The Importance of Listening

Understanding how listening works provides the foundation we need to explore why we listen, including various types and styles of listening. In general, listening helps us achieve all of our communication goals (physical, instrumental, relational, and identity). Listening is also important in academic, professional, and personal contexts. In terms of academics, poor listening skills were shown to contribute significantly to failure in a person’s first year of college (Zabava & Wolvin, 1993). In general, students with high scores for listening ability have greater academic achievement. Interpersonal communication skills including listening are also highly sought after by potential employers, consistently ranking in the top ten in national surveys (National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2021).

Poor listening skills, lack of conciseness, and inability to give constructive feedback have been identified as potential communication challenges in professional contexts. Even though listening education is lacking in our society, research has shown that introductory communication courses provide important skills necessary for functioning in entry-level jobs, including listening, writing, motivating/persuading, interpersonal skills, informational interviewing, and small-group problem solving (Di Salvo, 1980). Training and improvements in listening will continue to pay off, as employers desire employees with good communication skills, and employees who have good listening skills are more likely to get promoted.

Listening also has implications for our personal lives and relationships. We should not underestimate the power of listening to make someone else feel better and to open our perceptual field to new sources of information. Empathetic listening can help us expand our self and social awareness by learning from other people’s experiences, helping us take on different perspectives. Emotional support in the form of empathetic listening and validation during times of conflict can help relational partners manage common stressors of relationships that may otherwise lead a partnership to deteriorate (Milardo & Helms-Erikson, 2000).

Listening Types

Listening serves many purposes, and different situations require different types of listening. The type of listening we engage in affects our communication and how others respond to us. For example, when we listen to empathize with others, our communication will likely be supportive and open, which will then lead the other person to feel “heard” and supported (Bodie & Villaume, 2003). The main types of listening we will discuss are discriminative, informational, critical, and empathetic (Watson, Barker, & Weaver III, 1995).

Informational Listening

Informational listening entails listening with the goal of comprehending and retaining information. This type of listening is not evaluative and is common in teaching and learning contexts ranging from a student listening to an informative speech to an out-of-towner listening to directions to the nearest gas station. We also use informational listening when we listen to news reports, voice mail, and briefings at work. Since retention and recall are important components of informational listening, good concentration and memory skills are key. These also happen to be skills that many college students struggle with, at least in the first years of college. They will be expected to have mastered these skills once they get into professional contexts. In many professional contexts, informational listening is important, especially when receiving instructions. I caution my students that they will be expected to process verbal instructions more frequently in their profession than they are in college.

Critical Listening

Critical listening entails listening with the goal of analyzing or evaluating a message based on information presented verbally and information that can be inferred from context. A critical listener evaluates a message and accepts it, rejects it, or decides to withhold judgment and seek more information. As constant consumers of messages, we need to be able to assess the credibility of speakers and their messages and identify various persuasive appeals and faulty logic (known as fallacies). Critical listening is important during persuasive exchanges, but I recommend always employing some degree of critical listening, because you may find yourself in a persuasive interaction that you thought was informative. Critical-listening skills are useful when listening to a persuasive speech in this class and when processing any of the persuasive media messages we receive daily.

Empathetic Listening

Empathetic listening is the most challenging form of listening and occurs when we try to understand or experience what a speaker is thinking or feeling. Empathetic listening is distinct from sympathetic listening. While the word empathy means to “feel into” or “feel with” another person, sympathy means to “feel for” someone. Sympathy is generally more self-oriented and distant than empathy (Bruneau, 1993). Empathetic listening is other oriented and should be genuine. Because of our own centrality in our perceptual world, empathetic listening can be difficult. It is often much easier for us to tell our own story or to give advice than it is to really listen to and empathize with someone else. We should keep in mind that sometimes others just need to be heard and our feedback is not actually desired.

Empathetic listening is key for dialogue and helps maintain interpersonal relationships. In order to reach dialogue, people must have a degree of open-mindedness and a commitment to civility that allows them to be empathetic while still allowing them to believe in and advocate for their own position.

5.2 Barriers to Effective Listening

Barriers to effective listening are present at every stage of the listening process (Hargie, 2011). At the receiving stage, noise can block or distort incoming stimuli. At the interpreting stage, complex or abstract information may be difficult to relate to previous experiences, making it difficult to reach understanding. At the recalling stage, natural limits to our memory and challenges to concentration can interfere with remembering. At the evaluating stage, personal biases and prejudices can lead us to block people out or assume we know what they are going to say. At the responding stage, a lack of paraphrasing and questioning skills can lead to misunderstanding. In the following section, we will explore how environmental and physical factors, cognitive and personal factors, and bad listening practices present barriers to effective listening.

Environmental and Physical Barriers to Listening

Environmental factors such as lighting, temperature, and furniture affect our ability to listen. A room that is too dark can make us sleepy, just as a room that is too warm or cool can raise awareness of our physical discomfort to a point that it is distracting. Some seating arrangements facilitate listening, while others separate people. In general, listening is easier when listeners can make direct eye contact with and are in close physical proximity to a speaker. Even though the person may not have demonstrated any leadership abilities, people subconsciously gravitate toward speakers who are nonverbally accessible. The ability to effectively see and hear a person increases people’s confidence in their abilities to receive and process information. Eye contact and physical proximity can still be affected by noise.

Physiological noise, like environmental noise, can interfere with our ability to process incoming information. This is considered a physical barrier to effective listening because it emanates from our physical body. Physiological noise is noise stemming from a physical illness, injury, or bodily stress. Ailments such as a cold, a broken leg, a headache, or a poison ivy outbreak can range from annoying to unbearably painful and affect our listening relative to their intensity. Another type of noise, psychological noise, bridges physical and cognitive barriers to effective listening.

Psychological noise , or noise stemming from our psychological states including moods and level of arousal, can facilitate or impede listening. Any mood or state of arousal, positive or negative, that is too far above or below our regular baseline, creates a barrier to message reception and processing. The generally positive emotional state of being in love can be just as much of a barrier as feeling hatred. Excited arousal can also distract as much as anxious arousal. Stress about an upcoming events ranging from losing a job, to having surgery, to wondering about what to eat for lunch can overshadow incoming messages.

Psychological noise is relevant here given that the body and mind are not completely separate. In fact, they can interact in ways that further interfere with listening. Fatigue, for example, is usually a combination of psychological and physiological stresses that manifests as stress (psychological noise) and weakness, sleepiness, and tiredness (physiological noise). Additionally, mental anxiety (psychological noise) can also manifest itself in our bodies through trembling, sweating, blushing, or even breaking out in rashes (physiological noise).

Cognitive and Personal Barriers to Listening

Aside from the barriers to effective listening that may be present in the environment or emanate from our bodies, cognitive limits, a lack of listening preparation, difficult or disorganized messages, and prejudices can interfere with listening. Whether you call it multitasking, daydreaming, glazing over, or drifting off, we all cognitively process other things while receiving messages. If you think of your listening mind as a wall of ten televisions, you may notice that in some situations five of the ten televisions are tuned into one channel. If that one channel is a lecture being given by your professor, then you are exerting about half of your cognitive processing abilities on one message.

Difference between Speech and Thought Rate

Our ability to process more information than what comes from one speaker or source creates a barrier to effective listening. While people speak at a rate of 125 to 175 words per minute, we can process between 400 and 800 words per minute (Hargie, 2011). This gap between speech rate and thought rate gives us an opportunity to side-process any number of thoughts that can be distracting from a more important message. Because of this gap, it is impossible to give one message our “undivided attention,” but we can occupy other channels in our minds with thoughts related to the central message. For example, using some of your extra cognitive processing abilities to repeat, rephrase, or reorganize messages coming from one source allows you to use that extra capacity in a way that reinforces the primary message.

The difference between speech and thought rate connects to personal barriers to listening, as personal concerns are often the focus of competing thoughts that can take us away from listening and challenge our ability to concentrate on others’ messages. Two common barriers to concentration are self-centeredness and lack of motivation (Brownell, 1993). For example, when our self-consciousness is raised, we may be too busy thinking about how we look, how we’re sitting, or what others think of us to be attentive to an incoming message. Additionally, we are often challenged when presented with messages that we do not find personally relevant. In general, we employ selective attention , which refers to our tendency to pay attention to the messages that benefit us in some way and filter others out. Therefore, the student who is checking his or her Twitter feed during class may suddenly switch his or her attention back to the previously ignored professor when the following words are spoken: “This will be important for the exam.”

Oscar Wilde said, “Listening is a very dangerous thing. If one listens one may be convinced.” Unfortunately, some of our default ways of processing information and perceiving others lead us to rigid ways of thinking. When we engage in prejudiced listening, we are usually trying to preserve our ways of thinking and avoid being convinced of something different. This type of prejudice is a barrier to effective listening, because when we prejudge a person based on his or her identity or ideas, we usually stop listening in an active and/or ethical way.

We exhibit prejudice in our listening in several ways, some of which are more obvious than others. For example, we may claim to be in a hurry and only selectively address the parts of a message that we agree with or that are not controversial. We can also operate from a state of denial where we avoid a subject or person altogether so that our views are not challenged. Prejudices that are based on a person’s identity, such as race, age, occupation, or appearance, may lead us to assume that we know what he or she will say, essentially closing down the listening process. Keeping an open mind and engaging in perception checking can help us identify prejudiced listening and shift us into more competent listening practices.

Bad Listening Practices

The previously discussed barriers to effective listening may be difficult to overcome because they are at least partially beyond our control. Other “bad listening” practices may be habitual, but they are easier to address with some concerted effort. These bad listening practices include interrupting, distorted listening, eavesdropping, aggressive listening, narcissistic listening, and pseudo-listening.

Interrupting

Conversations unfold as a series of turns, and turn taking is negotiated through a complex set of verbal and nonverbal signals that are consciously and subconsciously received. In this sense, conversational turn taking has been likened to a dance where communicators try to avoid stepping on each other’s toes. One of the most frequent glitches in the turn-taking process is interruption, but not all interruptions are considered “bad listening.”

An interruption could be unintentional if we misread cues and think a person is done speaking only to have him or her start up again at the same time we do. Sometimes interruptions are more like overlapping statements that show support (e.g., “I think so too.”) or excitement about the conversation (e.g., “That’s so cool!”). Back-channel cues like “uh-huh” also overlap with a speaker’s message. We may also interrupt out of necessity if we are engaged in a task with the other person and need to offer directions (e.g., “Turn left here.”), instructions (e.g., “Will you whisk the eggs?”), or warnings (e.g., “Look out behind you!”). All these interruptions are not typically thought of as evidence of bad listening unless they become distracting for the speaker or are unnecessary.

Unintentional interruptions can still be considered bad listening if they result from mindless communication. As we have already learned, intended meaning is not as important as the meaning that is generated in the interaction itself. So if you interrupt unintentionally, but because you were only half-listening, then the interruption is still evidence of bad listening. The speaker may form a negative impression of you that cannot just be erased by you noting that you did not “mean to interrupt.” Interruptions can also be used as an attempt to dominate a conversation. A person engaging in this type of interruption may lead the other communicator to try to assert dominance, too, resulting in a competition to see who can hold the floor the longest or the most often. More than likely, though, the speaker will form a negative impression of the interrupter and may withdraw from the conversation.

Distorted Listening

Distorted listening occurs in many ways. Sometimes we just get the order of information wrong. This can have relatively little negative effects if we are casually recounting a story or we forget the order of turns (left, right, left or right, left, right?) in our driving directions. It can have very negative effects if we recount the events of a crime out of order, which leads to faulty testimony at a criminal trial. Rationalization is another form of distorted listening through which we adapt, edit, or skew incoming information to fit our existing schemata. We may, for example, reattribute the cause of something to better suit our own beliefs. If a professor is explaining to a student why he earned a “D” on his final paper, the student could reattribute the cause from “I didn’t follow the paper guidelines” to “this professor is an unfair grader.”

Sometimes we actually change the words we hear to make them better fit what we are thinking. This can easily happen if we join a conversation late, overhear part of a conversation, or are being a lazy listener and miss important setup and context. Passing along distorted information can lead to negative consequences ranging from starting a false rumor about someone to passing along incorrect medical instructions from one health-care provider to the next (Hargie, 2011). Last, the addition of material to a message is a type of distorted listening that actually goes against our normal pattern of listening, which involves reducing the amount of information and losing some meaning as we take it in. The metaphor of “weaving a tall tale” is related to the practice of distorting through addition, as inaccurate or fabricated information is added to what was actually heard.

Aggressive Listening

Aggressive listening is a bad listening practice in which people pay attention in order to attack something that a speaker says (McCornack, 2007). Aggressive listeners like to ambush speakers in order to critique their ideas, personality, or other characteristics. Such behavior often results from built-up frustration within an interpersonal relationship. Unfortunately, the more two people know each other, the better they will be at aggressive listening. Take the following exchange between long-term partners:

I have been thinking about making a salsa garden next to the side porch. I think it would be really good to be able to go pick our own tomatoes, peppers, and cilantro to make homemade salsa.

Really? When are you thinking about doing it?

Next weekend. Would you like to help?

I won’t hold my breath. Every time you come up with some “idea of the week”, you get so excited about it. But do you ever follow through with it? No. We’ll be eating salsa from the store next year, just like we are now.

Although Summer’s initial response to Deb’s idea is seemingly appropriate and positive, she asks the question because she has already planned her upcoming aggressive response. Summer’s aggression toward Deb is not about a salsa garden; it is about a building frustration with what Summer perceives as Deb’s lack of follow-through on her ideas. Aside from engaging in aggressive listening because of built-up frustration, such listeners may also attack others’ ideas or mock their feelings because of their own low self-esteem and insecurities.

Narcissistic Listening

Narcissistic listening is a form of self-centered and self-absorbed listening in which listeners try to make the interaction about them (McCornack, 2007). Narcissistic listeners redirect the focus of the conversation to them by interrupting or changing the topic. When the focus is taken off them, narcissistic listeners may give negative feedback by pouting, providing negative criticism of the speaker or topic, or ignoring the speaker. A common sign of narcissistic listening is the combination of a “pivot,” when listeners shift the focus of attention back to them, and “one-upping,” when listeners try to top what previous speakers have said during the interaction. You can see this narcissistic combination in the following interaction:

My boss has been really unfair to me lately and hasn’t been letting me work around my class schedule. I think I may have to quit, but I don’t know where I’ll find another job.

Why are you complaining? I’ve been working with the same stupid boss for two years. He doesn’t even care that I’m trying to get my degree and work at the same time. And you should hear the way he talks to me in front of the other employees.

Narcissistic listeners, given their self-centeredness, may actually fool themselves into thinking that they are listening and actively contributing to a conversation. We all have the urge to share our own stories during interactions, because other people’s communication triggers our own memories about related experiences. It is generally more competent to withhold sharing our stories until the other person has been able to speak and we have given the appropriate support and response. But we all shift the focus of a conversation back to us occasionally, either because we do not know another way to respond or because we are making an attempt at empathy. Narcissistic listeners consistently interrupt or follow another speaker with statements like “That reminds of the time…,” “Well, if I were you…,” and “That’s nothing…” (Nichols, 1995).

Pseudo-Listening

Do you have a friend or family member who repeats stories? If so, then you have probably engaged in pseudo-listening as a politeness strategy. Pseudo-listening is behaving as if you are paying attention to a speaker when you are actually not (McCornack, 2007). Outwardly, visible signals of attentiveness are an important part of the listening process, but when they are just an “act,” the pseudo-listener is engaging in bad listening behaviors. She or he is not actually going through the stages of the listening process and will likely not be able to recall the speaker’s message or offer a competent and relevant response. Although it is a bad listening practice, we all understandably engage in pseudo-listening from time to time.

If a friend needs someone to talk to but you are really tired or experiencing some other barrier to effective listening, it may be worth engaging in pseudo-listening as a relational maintenance strategy, especially if the friend just needs a sounding board and is not expecting advice or guidance. We may also pseudo-listen to a romantic partner or grandfather’s story for the fifteenth time to prevent hurting their feelings. We should avoid pseudo-listening when possible and should definitely avoid making it a listening habit. Although we may get away with it in some situations, each time we risk being “found out,” which could have negative relational consequences.

5.3 Improving Listening Competence

Many people admit that they could stand to improve their listening skills. This section will help us do that. In this section, we will learn strategies for developing and improving competence at each stage of the listening process. We will also define active listening and the behaviors that go along with it.

Looking back to the types of listening discussed earlier, we will learn specific strategies for sharpening our critical and empathetic listening skills. In keeping with our focus on integrative learning, we will also apply the skills we have learned in academic, professional, and relational contexts and explore how culture and gender affect listening.

Active Listening

Active listening refers to the process of pairing outwardly visible positive listening behaviors with positive cognitive listening practices. Active listening can help address many of the environmental, physical, cognitive, and personal barriers to effective listening that we discussed earlier. The behaviors associated with active listening can also enhance informational, critical, and empathetic listening.

Active Listening can Help Overcome Barriers to Effective Listening

Being an active listener starts before you actually start receiving a message. Active listeners make strategic choices and take action in order to set up ideal listening conditions. Physical and environmental noises can often be managed by moving locations or by manipulating the lighting, temperature, or furniture. When possible, avoid important listening activities during times of distracting psychological or physiological noise. For example, we often know when we are going to be hungry, full, more awake, less awake, more anxious, or less anxious, and advance planning can alleviate the presence of these barriers. For college students, who often have some flexibility in their class schedules, knowing when you best listen can help you make strategic choices regarding what class to take when.

In terms of cognitive barriers to effective listening, we can prime ourselves to listen by analyzing a listening situation before it begins. For example, you could ask yourself the following questions:

• “What are my goals for listening to this message?”
• “How does this message relate to me / affect my life?”
• “What listening type and style are most appropriate for this message?”

As we learned earlier, the difference between speech and thought processing rate means listeners’ level of attention varies while receiving a message. Effective listeners must work to maintain focus as much as possible and refocus when attention shifts or fades (Wolvin & Coakley, 1993). One way to do this is to find the motivation to listen. If you can identify intrinsic and or extrinsic motivations for listening to a particular message, then you will be more likely to remember the information presented. Ask yourself how a message could affect your life, your career, your intellect, or your relationships. This can help overcome our tendency toward selective attention. As senders of messages, we can help listeners by making the relevance of what we are saying clear and offering well-organized messages that are tailored for our listeners.

From the suggestions discussed previously, you can see that we can prepare for active listening in advance and engage in certain cognitive strategies to help us listen better. We also engage in active listening behaviors as we receive and process messages. Eye contact is a key sign of active listening. Speakers usually interpret a listener’s eye contact as a signal of attentiveness. While a lack of eye contact may indicate inattentiveness, it can also signal cognitive processing. When we look away to process new information, we usually do it unconsciously. Be aware, however, that your conversational partner may interpret this as not listening. If you really do need to take a moment to think about something, you could indicate that to the other person by saying, “That’s new information to me. Give me just a second to think through it.” We already learned the role that back-channel cues play in listening. An occasional head nod and “uh-huh” signal that you are paying attention. However, when we give these cues as a form of “autopilot” listening, others can usually tell that we are pseudo-listening, and whether they call us on it or not, that impression could lead to negative judgments.

A more direct way to indicate active listening is to reference previous statements made by the speaker. Norms of politeness usually call on us to reference a past statement or connect to the speaker’s current thought before starting a conversational turn. Being able to summarize what someone said to ensure that the topic has been satisfactorily covered and understood or being able to segue in such a way that validates what the previous speaker said helps regulate conversational flow. Asking probing questions is another way to indicate listening and to keep a conversation going, since they encourage and invite a person to speak more. You can also ask questions that seek clarification and not just elaboration. Speakers should present complex information at a slower speaking rate than familiar information, but many will not. Remember that your nonverbal feedback can be useful for a speaker, as it signals that you are listening but also whether or not you understand. If a speaker fails to read your nonverbal feedback, you may need to follow up with verbal communication in the form of paraphrased messages and clarifying questions.

As active listeners, we want to be excited and engaged, but do not let excitement manifest itself in interruptions. Being an active listener means knowing when to maintain our role as listener and resist the urge to take a conversational turn. Research shows that people with higher social status are more likely to interrupt others, so keep this in mind and be prepared for it if you are speaking to a high-status person, or try to resist it if you are the high-status person in an interaction (Hargie, 2011).

Note taking can also indicate active listening. Translating information through writing into our own cognitive structures and schemata allows us to better interpret and assimilate information. Of course, note taking is not always a viable option. It would be awkward to take notes during a first date or a casual exchange between new coworkers. But in some situations where we would not normally consider taking notes, a little awkwardness might be worth it for the sake of understanding and recalling the information. For example, many people do not think about taking notes when getting information from their doctor or banker. To help facilitate your note taking, you might say something like “Do you mind if I jot down some notes? This seems important.”

In summary, active listening is exhibited through verbal and nonverbal cues, including steady eye contact with the speaker; smiling; slightly raised eyebrows; upright posture; body position that is leaned in toward the speaker; nonverbal back-channel cues such as head nods; verbal back-channel cues such as “OK,” “mmhum,” or “oh”; and a lack of distracting mannerisms like doodling or fidgeting (Hargie, 2011).

Becoming a Better Critical Listener

Critical listening involves evaluating the credibility, completeness, and worth of a speaker’s message. Some listening scholars note that critical listening represents the deepest level of listening (Floyd, 1985). Critical listening is also important in a democracy that values free speech. The US Constitution grants US citizens the right to free speech, and many people duly protect that right for you and me. Since people can say just about anything they want, we are surrounded by countless messages that vary tremendously in terms of their value, degree of ethics, accuracy, and quality. Therefore, it falls on us to responsibly and critically evaluate the messages we receive. People who are intentionally misleading, ill informed, or motivated by the potential for personal gain produce some messages, but such messages can be received as honest, credible, or altruistic even though they are not. Being able to critically evaluate messages helps us have more control over and awareness of the influence such people may have on us. In order to critically evaluate messages, we must enhance our critical-listening skills.

Some critical-listening skills include distinguishing between facts and inferences, evaluating supporting evidence, discovering your own biases, and listening beyond the message. Part of being an ethical communicator is being accountable for what we say by distinguishing between facts and inferences (Hayakawa & Hayakawa, 1990). This is an ideal that is not always met in practice, so a critical listener should also make these distinctions, since the speaker may not. Since facts are widely agreed-on conclusions, they can be verified as such through some extra research. Take care in your research to note the context from which the fact emerged, as speakers may take a statistic or quote out of context, distorting its meaning. Inferences are not as easy to evaluate, because they are based on unverifiable thoughts of a speaker or on speculation. Inferences are usually based at least partially on something that is known, so it is possible to evaluate whether an inference was made carefully or not. In this sense, you may evaluate an inference based on several known facts as more credible than an inference based on one fact and more speculation. Asking a question like “What led you to think this?” is a good way to get information needed to evaluate the strength of an inference.

Distinguishing among facts and inferences and evaluating the credibility of supporting material are critical-listening skills that also require good informational-listening skills. In more formal speaking situations, speakers may cite published or publicly available sources to support their messages. When speakers verbally cite their sources, you can use the credibility of the source to help evaluate the credibility of the speaker’s message. For example, a national newspaper would likely be more credible on a major national event than a tabloid magazine or an anonymous blog. In regular interactions, people also have sources for their information but are not as likely to note them within their message. Asking questions like “Where’d you hear that?” or “How do you know that?” can help get information needed to make critical evaluations.

Discovering your own biases can help you recognize when they interfere with your ability to process a message. Unfortunately, most people are not asked to critically reflect on their identities and their perspectives unless they are in college, and even people who were once critically reflective in college or elsewhere may no longer be so. Biases are also difficult to discover, because we do not see them as biases; we see them as normal or “the way things are.” Asking yourself “What led you to think this?” and “How do you know that?” can be a good start toward acknowledging your biases.

Last, to be a better critical listener, think beyond the message. A good critical listener asks the following questions: What is being said and what is not being said? In whose interests are these claims being made? Whose voices/ ideas are included and excluded? These questions take into account that speakers intentionally and unintentionally slant, edit, or twist messages to make them fit particular perspectives or for personal gain. Also, ask yourself questions like “What are the speaker’s goals?” You can also rephrase that question and direct it toward the speaker, asking them, “What is your goal in this interaction?” When you feel yourself nearing an evaluation or conclusion, pause and ask yourself what influenced you. Although we like to think that we are most often persuaded through logical evidence and reasoning, we are susceptible to persuasive shortcuts that rely on the credibility or likability of a speaker or on our emotions rather than the strength of his or her evidence (Petty & Cacioppo, 1984). So keep a check on your emotional involvement to be aware of how it may be influencing your evaluation. Also, be aware that how likable, attractive, or friendly you think a person is may also lead you to evaluate more positively his or her messages.

Becoming a Better Empathetic Listener

Combining active and empathetic listening leads to active-empathetic listening. During active-empathetic listening, a listener becomes actively and emotionally involved in an interaction in such a way that it is conscious on the part of the listener and perceived by the speaker (Bodie, 2011). To be a better empathetic listener, we need to suspend or at least attempt to suppress our judgment of the other person or their message so we can fully attend to both. Paraphrasing is an important part of empathetic listening, because it helps us put the other person’s words into our frame of experience without making it about us. In addition, speaking the words of someone else in our own way can help evoke within us the feelings that the other person felt while saying them (Bodie, 2011). Active-empathetic listening is more than echoing back verbal messages. We can also engage in mirroring , which refers to a listener’s replication of the nonverbal signals of a speaker (Bruneau, 1993). Therapists, for example, are often taught to adopt a posture and tone similar to their patients in order to build rapport and project empathy.

Paraphrasing and questioning are useful techniques for empathetic listening because they allow us to respond to a speaker without taking “the floor,” or the attention, away for long. Specifically, questions that ask for elaboration act as “verbal door openers,” and inviting someone to speak more and then validating their speech through active listening cues can help a person feel “listened to” (Hargie, 2011).

Listening and Culture

Some cultures place more importance on listening than other cultures. In general, collectivistic cultures tend to value listening more than individualistic cultures that are more speaker oriented. The value placed on verbal and nonverbal meaning also varies by culture and influences how we communicate and listen. A low-context communication style is one in which much of the meaning generated within an interaction comes from the verbal communication used rather than nonverbal or contextual cues. Conversely, much of the meaning generated by a high-context communication style comes from nonverbal and contextual cues (Lustig & Koester, 2006). For example, US Americans of European descent generally use a low-context communication style, while people in East Asian and Latin American cultures use a high-context communication style.

Contextual communication styles affect listening in many ways. Cultures with a high-context orientation generally use less verbal communication and value silence as a form of communication, which requires listeners to pay close attention to nonverbal signals and consider contextual influences on a message. Cultures with a low-context orientation must use more verbal communication and provide explicit details, since listeners are not expected to derive meaning from the context. Note that people from low-context cultures may feel frustrated by the ambiguity of speakers from high-context cultures, while speakers from high-context cultures may feel overwhelmed or even insulted by the level of detail used by low-context communicators. Cultures with a low-context communication style also tend to have a monochronic orientation toward time, while high-context cultures have a polychronic time orientation, which also affects listening.

Listening and Gender

Research on gender and listening has produced mixed results. As we have already learned, much of the research on gender differences and communication has been influenced by gender stereotypes and falsely connected to biological differences. Research that is more recent has found that people communicate in ways that conform to gender stereotypes in some situations and not in others, which shows that our communication is more influenced by societal expectations than by innate or gendered “hard-wiring.”

For example, through socialization, men are generally discouraged from expressing emotions in public. A woman sharing an emotional experience with a man may perceive the man’s lack of emotional reaction as a sign of inattentiveness, especially if he typically shows more emotion during private interactions. The man, however, may be listening but withholding nonverbal expressiveness because of social norms. He may not realize that withholding those expressions could be seen as a lack of empathetic or active listening. Researchers also dispelled the belief that men interrupt more than women do, finding that men and women interrupt each other with similar frequency in cross-gender encounters (Dindia, 1987). So men may interrupt each other more in same-gender interactions as a conscious or subconscious attempt to establish dominance because such behaviors are expected, as men are generally socialized to be more competitive than women are. However, this type of competitive interrupting is not as present in cross-gender interactions because the contexts have shifted.

Figure 5.1: Listening has cognitive, behavioral, and relational elements. Andrea Piacquadio. 2020. Pexels license . https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-red-polo-shirt-sitting-near-chalkboard-3779448/?utm_content=attributionCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pexels

Figure 5.2: Music is an example of a barrier to effective listening. Jonas Schindler. 2021. Unsplash license . https://unsplash.com/photos/oDnYWhqiOro

Figure 5.3: Bad listening practices. Kindred Grey. 2022. CC BY 4.0 .

Figure 5.4: Common practices of active listening. Kindred Grey. 2022. CC BY 4.0 .

Figure 5.5: Ways to become a better critical listener. Kindred Grey. 2022. CC BY 4.0 .

Section 5.1

Bodie, G. D., & Villaume, W. A. (2003). Aspects of receiving information: The relationships between listening preferences, communication apprehension, receiver apprehension, and communicator style. International Journal of Listening, 17 (1), 47-67. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2003.10499055

Bruneau, T. (1993). Empathy and listening. In A. D. Wolvin & C. G. Coakley (Eds.), Perspectives on listening (pp. 185-200). Ablex Publishing Corporation.

Di Salvo, V. S. (1980). A summary of current research identifying communication skills in various organizational contexts. Communication Education, 29(3), 283–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634528009378426

Hargie, O. (2011). Skilled interpersonal interaction: Research, theory, and practice . Routledge.

Milardo, R. M., & Helms-Erickson, H. (2000). Network overlap and third-party influence in close relationships. In C. Hendrick & S. S. Hendrick (Eds.), Close relationships: A sourcebook (pp.33-45). Sage.

National Association of Colleges and Employers. (n.d.). Job outlook 2021. https://www.naceweb.org/store/2020/job-outlook-2021/

Watson, K. W., Barker, L. L., & Weaver III, J. B. (1995). The Listening Styles Profile (LS-16):

Development and validation of an instrument to assess four listening styles. International Journal of Listening, 9 (1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.1995.10499138

Zabava Ford, W. S., & Wolvin, A. D. (1993). The differential impact of a basic communication course on perceived communication competencies in class, work, and social contexts. Communication Education, 42 (3), 215–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634529309378929

Section 5.2

Brownell, J. (1993). Listening environment: A perspective. . In A. D. Wolvin & C. G. Coakley (Eds.), Perspectives on listening (pp. 241-260). Ablex Publishing Corporation.

McCornack, S. (2007). Reflect & relate: An introduction to interpersonal communication . Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Nichols, M. P. (1995). The lost art of listening. Guilford Press.

Section 5.3

Bodie, G. D. (2011). The Active-Empathetic Listening Scale (AELS): Conceptualization and evidence of validity within the interpersonal domain. Communication Quarterly, 59(3), 277-295. https://doi.org/10.1080/01463373.2011.583495

Dindia, K. (1987). The effect of sex of subject and sex of partner on interruptions. Human Communication Research, 13(3), 345–371. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1987.tb00109.x

Floyd, J. J. (1985). Listening: A practical approach. Scott, Foresman.

Hayakawa, S. I., & Hayakawa, A. R. (1990). Language in thought and action (5th ed.). Harcourt Brace.

Lustig, M. W., & Koester, J. (2006). Intercultural competence: Interpersonal communication across cultures (5th ed.). Pearson Education.

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1984). The effects of involvement on responses to argument quantity and quality: Central and peripheral routes to persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46 (1), 69–81. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.46.1.69

Wolvin, A. D., & Coakley, C. G. (1993). A listening taxonomy. In A. D. Wolvin & C. G. Coakley (Eds.), Perspectives on listening (pp. 15-22). Ablex Publishing Corporation.

The learned process of receiving, interpreting, recalling, evaluating, and responding to verbal and nonverbal messages

To rephrase a message into your own words

Listening with the intent of comprehending and retaining information

Listening with the goal of analyzing or evaluating a message based on information presented verbally and information we can infer from context

The most challenging form of listening that occurs when we try to understand or experience what a speaker is thinking or feeling

Noise stemming from physical injury, illness, or bodily stress

Noise stemming from our psychological states including moods and level of arousal

Behaving as if you are paying attention to a speaker when you are actually not

Refers to the process of pairing outwardly visible positive listening behaviors with positive cognitive listening practices

Communication where much of the meaning generated within an interaction comes from the verbal communication used rather than nonverbal or contextual cues

Communication where much of the meaning is generated from nonverbal and contextual cues

Communication in the Real World Copyright © by Faculty members in the School of Communication Studies, James Madison University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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7 Active Listening Techniques For Better Communication

It's time to start having more intentional conversations

• How to Improve

Active listening is a communication skill that involves going beyond simply hearing the words that another person speaks. It's about actively processing and seeking to understand the meaning and intent behind them. It requires being a mindful and focused participant in the communication process.

Active listening techniques include:

• Being fully present in the conversation
• Showing interest by practicing good eye contact
• Noticing (and using) non-verbal cues
• Asking open-ended questions to encourage further responses
• Paraphrasing and reflecting back what has been said
• Listening to understand rather than to respond
• Withholding judgment and advice

Sabrina Romanoff, PsyD explains, "Active listening requires de-centering from one’s fixed position to be fully present with another. It helps people feel more understood and strengthens relationships as it signals a willingness to sit with the other’s perspective and empathy for their situation instead of singular focus on oneself."

MStudioImages / Getty Images

In communication, active listening is important because it keeps you engaged with your conversation partner in a positive way. It also makes the other person feel heard and valued. This skill is the foundation of a successful conversation in any setting—whether at work, at home, or in social situations.

Romanoff continues, "Ultimately, it shows respect and value for the other person’s needs, concerns, and ideas as the listener is actively signaling the other person matters to them."

When you practice active listening, you are fully engaged and immersed in what the other person is saying.

7 Active Listening Techniques

The word "active" implies that you are taking some type of action when listening to others. This involves the use of certain strategies or techniques. Here are seven active listening techniques to consider.

1. Be Fully Present

Active listening requires being fully present in the conversation. This enables you to concentrate on what is being said. Being present involves listening with all your senses (sight, sound, etc.) and giving your full attention to the speaker.

"Being fully present involves the skill of tuning into the other person’s inner world while stepping away from your own. This is a power skill in deeply connecting and sitting with another’s emotions," says Romanoff.

To use this active listening technique effectively, put away your cell phone, ignore distractions, avoid daydreaming, and shut down your internal dialogue. Place your focus on your conversation partner and let everything else slip away.

2. Pay Attention to Non-Verbal Cues

As much as 65% of a person's communication is unspoken. Paying attention to these nonverbal cues can tell you a lot about the person and what they are trying to say. If they talk fast, for instance, this could be a sign that they are nervous or anxious. If they talk slowly, they may be tired or trying to carefully choose their words.

During active listening, your non-verbal behaviors are just as important. To show the person you're truly tuned in, use open, non-threatening body language. This involves not folding your arms, smiling while listening, leaning in, and nodding at key junctures.

It can also be helpful to pay attention to your facial expressions when active listening so that you don't convey any type of negative response.

3. Keep Good Eye Contact

When engaged in active listening, making eye contact is especially important. This tells the other person that you are present and listening to what they say. It also shows that you aren't distracted by anything else around you.

At the same time, you don't want to use so much eye contact that the conversation feels weird. To keep this from happening, follow the 50/70 rule. This involves maintaining eye contact for 50% to 70% of the time spent listening, holding the contact for four to five seconds before briefly looking away.

4. Ask Open-Ended Questions

Asking "yes or no" questions often produce dead-end answers. This isn't helpful during active listening as it keeps the conversation from flowing. It also makes it difficult to truly listen to the other person because there isn't much you can gain from a short, non-descriptive response.

Instead, ask open-ended questions to show that you are interested in the conversation and the other person. Examples of open-ended questions you may use when active listening include:

• Can you tell me a bit more about that?
• What did you think about that?
• What do you think is the best path moving forward?
• How do you think you could have responded differently?

The key to open-ended questions is to have a framework of curiosity about the other person. It signals genuine interest – making the other person feel valued and enables you to better understand them," adds Romanoff.

Open-ended questions encourage thoughtful, expansive responses, which is why they are often used by mental health therapists.

5. Reflect What You Hear

After the person has spoken, tell them what you heard. This active listening technique ensures that you've captured their thoughts, ideas, and/or emotions accurately. It also helps the other person feel validated and understood while keeping any potential miscommunications to a minimum.

One way to reflect what you've heard is to paraphrase. For example, you might say, "In other words, what you are saying is that you're frustrated" or "I'm hearing that you're frustrated about this situation." Summarize what you've heard and give the person the opportunity to say whether you've captured their meaning or intent.

If you'd like to better understand something the person has said, ask for clarification. But don't focus so much on insignificant details that you miss the big picture.

6, Be Patient

Patience is an important active listening technique because it allows the other person to speak without interruption. It also gives them the time to say what they are thinking without having to try to finish their sentences for them.

Being patient involves not trying to fill periods of silence with your own thoughts or stories. It also requires listening to understand, not to respond. That is, don't prepare a reply while the other person is still speaking. Also, don't change the subject too abruptly as this conveys boredom and impatience.

During active listening, you are there to act as a sounding board rather than to jump in with your own ideas and opinions about what is being said.

7, Withhold Judgment

Remaining neutral and non-judgmental in your responses enables the other person to feel comfortable with sharing their thoughts. It makes the conversation to a safe zone where they can trust that they won't be shamed, criticized, blamed, or otherwise negatively received.

Ways to be less judgmental when listening include:

• Expressing empathy for the person or their situation
• Learning more about different people and cultures
• Practicing acceptance of others
• Recognizing when you may be judging the other person, then stopping those thoughts

Active Listening Example

What does active listening look like? Here is an example of a conversation in which several different active listening techniques are used.

Lisa : I'm sorry to dump this on you, but I had a fight with my sister, and we haven't spoken since. I'm upset and don't know who to talk to.

Jodie : No problem! Tell me more about what happened. (open-ended question)

Lisa : Well, we were arguing about what to do for our parents' anniversary. I'm still so angry.

Jodie : Oh that's tough. You sound upset that you're not speaking because of it. (reflecting what was heard)

Lisa : Yes, she just makes me so angry. She assumed I would help her plan this elaborate party—I don't have time! It's like she couldn't see things from my perspective at all.

Jodie : Wow, that's too bad. How did that make you feel? (another open-ended question)

Lisa: Frustrated. Angry. Maybe a bit guilty that she had all these plans, and I was the one holding them back. Finally, I told her to do it without me. But that's not right, either.

Jodie : Sounds complicated. I bet you need some time to sort out how you feel about it. (withholding judgment)

Lisa : Yes, I guess I do. Thanks for listening—I just needed to vent.

Why Active Listening Is Important

Getting into the habit of active listening can have positive impacts in many key areas of your life. It can affect your relationships, your work, and your social interactions.

In Relationships

Active listening helps you better understand another person's point of view and respond with empathy. This is important in all types of healthy relationships , whether with a spouse, parent, child, another family member, or friend.

Being an active listener in your relationships involves recognizing that the conversation is more about the other person than about you. This is especially important when the other person is emotionally distressed.

Your ability to listen actively to a family member or friend who is going through a difficult time is a valuable communication skill. It helps keep you from offering opinions and solutions when the other person really just wants to be heard.

Active listening at work is particularly important if you are in a supervisory position or interact frequently with colleagues. It helps you understand problems and collaborate to develop solutions . It also showcases your patience, a valuable asset in the workplace.

In some cases, active listening while on the job can help improve workplace safety. For instance, if you are in the healthcare field, engaging in active listening can help reduce medical errors and prevent unintentional patient harm.

During Social Situations

Active listening techniques such as reflecting, asking open-ended questions, seeking clarification, and watching body language help you develop relationships when meeting new people . People who are active and empathic listeners are good at initiating and maintaining conversations.

Active listening helps others feel more emotionally supported. This can be beneficial when interacting with a person who has social anxiety . According to research, emotional support impacts the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain, resulting in decreased feelings of distress for socially anxious individuals.

Press Play for Advice on Active Listening

Hosted by therapist Amy Morin, LCSW, this episode of The Verywell Mind Podcast shares the value of listening to others, featuring psychiatrist Mark Goulston.

Follow Now :  Apple Podcasts  /  Spotify  /  Google Podcasts  

Ways to Improve Active Listening

We've all been in situations where our "listeners" were distracted or disinterested. Or maybe you want to improve your own active listening skills so you don't do this to others.

Here are a few ways to be a better active listener yourself, or to encourage others to do the same:

• Encourage your own curiosity . The more curious you are about something, the easier it becomes to want to know more. This naturally causes you to ask more questions and to seek to understand, which are two of the core foundations of active listening in communication.
• Find a topic that interests you both . This works particularly well when engaging in small talk as you get to know one another. If you both have passion for the topic, it becomes easier to stay fully engaged in the conversation.
• Practice your active listening skills . Like with any skill, being good at active listening takes some practice. Be patient with yourself as you go through the learning process . Continuing to practice these skills may just inspire the person you're conversing with to do the same. By seeing you demonstrate active listening, they might become a better listener too.
• Understand when exiting the conversation is best . If you're talking with another person and they are clearly uninterested in the conversation, it may be best to end that conversation respectfully. This can help keep you from feeling annoyed and unheard.

If you find that you are having trouble with listening, you might benefit from professional treatment. Other options include engaging in social skills training or reading self-help books on interpersonal skills.

Keep in Mind

Active listening is an important social skill that has value in many different settings. Practice its many techniques often and it will become second nature. You'll start to ask open-ended questions and reflect what you've heard in your conversations without much (if any) thought.

"Ultimately, active listening helps the speaker feel more understood and heard—and helps the listener have more information and understanding. On both ends of active listening—people feel more connected and collaborative which is why it is such a vital tool when it comes to communication," says Romanoff.

If you find active listening techniques difficult, consider what might be getting in your way. Are you experiencing social anxiety during conversations or do you struggle with attention ? Getting help for these types of issues can help you improve your active listening skills, making you a better listener overall.

Frequently Asked Questions

Active listening helps you build trust and understand other people's situations and feelings. In turn, this empowers you to offer support and empathy. Unlike critical listening, active listening seeks to understand rather than reply. The goal is for the other person to be heard, validated, and inspired to solve their problems.

The three A's of active listening are attention, attitude, and adjustment. Attention entails being fully tuned in to the speaker's words and gestures. The proper attitude is one of positivity and open-mindedness. Adjustment is the ability to change your gestures, body language, and reactions as the speaker's story unfolds.

Reflection is the active listening technique that demonstrates that you understand and empathize with the person's feelings. In mirroring and summarizing what they've said, they feel heard and understood.

There are numerous ways to improve your active listening skills. One is to watch skilled interviewers on talk and news shows. Another is to research active listening techniques online and try them often in your everyday conversations, noting the speakers' reactions and looking for areas that need improvement.

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Pennsylvania State University. Active listening . 

University of California, Berkeley. Active listening . Greater Good Science Center.

By Arlin Cuncic, MA Arlin Cuncic, MA, is the author of The Anxiety Workbook and founder of the website About Social Anxiety. She has a Master's degree in clinical psychology.

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Communication Means Paying Attention: The Four Pillars of Active Listening

In this podcast episode, Julian Treasure shares how listening is where human understanding begins.

November 07, 2023

We should all be audience-centric in communication. But, as Julian Treasure contests, we need to take it one step further: “What is the listening I am speaking into?” is a question every speaker should ask themself.

“Every human being’s listening is unique… we listen through a set of filters, and those filters develop as we grow and mature in life and we have experiences. Knowing where the person is coming from, you’ll be able to sense their listening.”

Treasure , an expert on speaking and sound, also advises, “if you want to speak powerfully, develop a breathing practice. And that can be as simple as conscious breathing, which is breathing in through the nose, out through the mouth.”

In this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart , Treasure and host Matt Abrahams explore the power of breath, the steps to show we’re listening, and how framing speech as a gift can better serve our audience.

Listen & Subscribe

Think Fast, Talk Smart is a podcast produced by Stanford Graduate School of Business. Each episode provides concrete, easy-to-implement tools and techniques to help you hone and enhance your communication skills.

Full Transcript

Matt Abrahams: The best way to be heard is to first listen. My name is Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast . Today I am really excited to speak with Julian Treasure. Julian is an expert on listening, speaking, and sound. He has presented five Ted talks that have been viewed over 100 million times. He is a speaker, coach, and author of How to Be Heard, Secrets of Powerful Speaking and Listening . Julian, thanks for being here.

Julian Treasure: Well, thank you for having me.

Matt Abrahams: Yes. I have to admit that I’m a bit of a fanboy for your content. I’ve used your talks in my classes for years and I look forward to our conversation. Shall we get started?

Julian Treasure: Please.

Matt Abrahams: Alright. Over the course of our many episodes, the importance and value of listening in our personal and professional lives has been mentioned time and time again. Can you share why listening is so important and can you distinguish among different types of listening, like what you term partial and conscious listening?

Julian Treasure: Well, listening is crucial because conscious listening always creates understanding, and I don’t think I’d have to persuade many people listening to this of the importance of understanding in the world today. And indeed the importance of listening. Never have we needed it more than we do. And the absence of listening, the absence of conscious listening tends to put us on a slippery slope, which is enormously accelerated, I think, by the current technology that surrounds us. So you see more and more people descending into silos of entrenched opinion and not listening in a way that’s actually going to create new ideas or challenge their opinions. Barack Obama said a good thing in his acceptance speech. He said, I will listen to you, especially when we disagree, and I think that’s quite an important attitude to have in the world, but we don’t really very much these days.

So listening is the basis of all human understanding. It’s the basis of relationship. After all, what’s the most common complaint in relationships? He or she never listens to me. It’s the way we learn. It’s said in ancient Greece, used to erect a screen in front of the lecturer so that the students who he called a were not distracted by seeing the person speaking from the important business of learning, which of course is listening. So he considered vision to be very distracting from the real business of listening. Listening is how we can sell or persuade or enroll people as well. Of course, any great salesperson will tell you the most important part of a sales conversation is not the speaking, it’s the listening. Because how can you sell to somebody if you don’t understand exactly what their problem is and how you can solve it? So we’ve all had the experience of somebody battering us with sales stuff that really isn’t relevant at all, and that’s simply because they’re not good listeners. So in all sorts of areas of human life leadership as well, of course, it’s very difficult to lead people and inspire people and if you’re not listening to them, if you don’t understand them and understand what makes them tick. So it’s crucial at every level of human endeavor really, and particularly human relationships.

Matt Abrahams: You have made a very persuasive case for the importance of listening. It’s about understanding, connecting, influencing, and the ability for us to be successful. One of the skills that I make sure my students listen to when they watch your talks is the four step process you teach to be a more effective listener. You call it RASA.

Would you be willing to walk us through those four steps and perhaps even give examples about how we can implement them in our lives?

Julian Treasure: Yes, and RASA, again, actually that came in the talk on listening, but it straddles both sides of the communication. So it’s very much also about speaking. So rasa, the Sanskrit word for juice, as I discovered when I was creating this acronym, it stands for receive, appreciate, summarize, ask. So four steps, and it’s a very good way to be in a conversation if you bear it in mind and work these four steps. So receive means what we were talking about before, really paying attention to the person who’s speaking. Now in the western world, I mean this differs culturally, but in the western world it tends to be that the person speaking will glance around and from time to time glance back at the listener to make sure that they’re still listening, but they won’t maintain constant eye contact. You see people doing that on TV actually.

I mean that’s how it works. People stand roughly a foot apart, nose to nose talking to each other and looking at each other and it looks fine on tv. But if you try doing that in real life, it’s very intimidating and unnatural actually. So that tends to be when you’re speaking, you’re looking around thinking, maybe looking out, but having ideas, checking in. But the listener needs to be maintaining eye contact. We all know the feeling of speaking to somebody who is gazing out of the window or thinking about what they’re going to have for lunch or evidently distracted. Even worse, falling asleep if you are giving a talk or something like that. Looking interested is really helpful in a conversation. So that would be perhaps leaning slightly forward as opposed to lolling back, it would be definitely looking at the person who’s speaking your whole body. I mean there’s a lot of body language stuff here. Not having your feet pointing at the door, not having your body angled away from the person as if you’re trying to get ready to flee. So all of these little symbols and signs can indicate that you are with them or you’re not with them, and if you really switch on this receive, it makes the conversation far more powerful and it makes the other person feel more comfortable, which is particularly important if they’re not necessarily a practiced or powerful speaker. So that’s the R of receipt,

Matt Abrahams: And I’m just going to interrupt very quickly just to say you do a fantastic job as we’ve been doing this conversation, obviously people are listening only to us. But as I’m speaking, I notice you doing all of the things that you’ve mentioned and I find myself now trying to do what you’ve just mentioned as you speak. So you’re not only explaining it, but you’re practicing it. And I invite you to continue now please with the other three steps.

Julian Treasure: Well, thank you. And it has to be qualified in different environments with different contexts. I talk about speaking and listening, that circle happening in a context and there’s always a context. It might be terrible acoustics, we don’t have that right now, but in radio for example, I mean if we couldn’t see each other, then you have to be a little bit more careful. If there’s an interview, it’s very irritating. If the interview is constantly doing what I’m about to suggest we do now, which is appreciation. So the appreciate is the little noises that we make to oil conversation. Oh, really? Wow. That kind of thing, which you are not doing because it would be irritating for the people listening to this to have that constant interruption from you. And I wouldn’t do it to you either. So what we can do also is visual signals, and that’s little nods, bobs of the heads, raises of the eyebrows, smiles, all those kind of little visual signals that say, I’m listening, I’m with you.

That’s interesting and so forth. So again, the nonverbal side of this, the visual side of this is quite important. If you can see somebody, and if you can’t, you can’t. So that doesn’t matter. And in which case, I mean typically in a podcast, if I can’t see the person I’m talking to, then it’s a question of listening more intently and more carefully. Radio and podcasting doesn’t like dead air, so you can’t have great big silences, but equally you don’t want this kind of thing going on in that medium. So it is a question of context and thinking carefully. If you’re in a very noisy place for example, then you may need to really be more vociferous in your appreciation. So that’s the A rasa. The S is summarizing, and I want to form a society for preservation of the word so which is a sorely abused word now.

So is a way to summarize and shut doors as you go down the corridor of the conversation, you can shut doors behind you and lock things down. So what I understood you to say is this, is that right? Yeah. Okay, let’s move on. Or in a meeting, if you don’t have a so person in the meeting, it can be a very, very long meeting indeed. So what we’ve all agreed is this. Can we take it that that’s right? Yes. Okay, well let’s move on to the next item on the agenda. What is it they say about meetings? Places where you take minutes and waste hours, which can absolutely be the case if you don’t have a so person you can go round and round and round and say, so can we all just summarize what we believe in this so we can move on? It’s a very important word in a conversation. So that’s the word, and I did use it to mean therefore there. And then we have the A at the end, which is ask, and that’s questions. Ideally open-ended questions, why, what, where, which who? Those kind of questions which don’t permit the answer yes or no.

One thing actually I get asked a lot by people who perhaps feel it’s difficult for them to make themselves heard is how can I do that? How can I engage when people don’t listen to me? Well, asking questions in a conversation is a very good way of engaging people and making a connection. And particularly if I’m talking to somebody who’s going on about something, I know nothing at all about, I am thinking hard about how could I bridge this? But it’s a really good way of trying to build a bridge in the conversation and to offer something you do know something about or to take it onto territory you feel a bit more comfortable with. So that’s rasa, receive, appreciate, summarize, ask. It sounds complicated now that I’ve gone into it in a bit of detail, but it’s really simple and it’s a great thing just to practice with friends, family, colleagues, people at work, whoever it might be that you will find it makes a big difference in communication.

Matt Abrahams: So thank you very much. I purposely wanted to throw the so in there, I have found this over the years to be very helpful to me. It’s been very helpful to my students, this notion of receive, appreciate, summarize, and ask. I love the idea of having a so person not just in meetings but in life. And I think many of us can examine the situations we are in and determine if we need to be that person to help summarize.

And I just want to note for our listeners and to compliment you on the fact that you do a very nice job at the end of each of your answers, doing your own summary. And that’s something that I think many of us fail to do. We just rattle off all of our points hoping that our listeners can aggregate them in some way and make sense of them, but often, especially when speaking for a little bit summarizing for our audience, for our listener can be helpful. One of the most important lessons that has emerged from the many experts I’ve interviewed on this podcast is that we must be audience-centric in our communication.

Matt Abrahams: You have your own spin on this that I really, really like. You ask, what is the listening I am speaking into? Can you shed light on what you mean by this? And how can we adapt our communication depending on the type of listening that we expect?

Julian Treasure: Well, this comes from my observation that every human being’s listening is unique. It’s as unique as your fingerprints are. And the reason for that is that we listen through a set of filters and those filters develop as we grow and mature in life and we have experiences. So they start with things like the language we learn to speak the culture we are born into, which might be family, it might be tribe or group, it might be local, it might be city, it might be region, might be national, whatever it is, might be all of those things. There’s a culture we’re born into and these things shape our listening. And then you have the values, attitudes and beliefs that you gather along the way from parents, teachers, friends, role models. You pick some up, you discard others and the ones you’ve picked up will be the different from the ones I’ve picked up.

And then in any situation, we might have expectations, we might have intentions, we might have emotions going on, we might have assumptions about particularly what’s going on in other people’s heads, which is a big area, and those things change our listening. So I don’t think he likes me. Then you’re listening in a different way. So the emotional, I mean, do you listen in a different way if you’ve just had fabulous news from if you’ve just had some terrible news, of course you do. So people’s listening changes over time and listening changes from person to person. So it’s very important to ask that question, what’s the listening I’m speaking into? Because you are always speaking into somebody’s listening and that listening is unique to them. Now, whether it’s one person or a thousand, if you put a thousand people in a room, you get a kind of gestalt listening.

And it’s perfectly possible if you simply ask this question over and over again to yourself becomes a practice, then you become more and more sensitive to it. And it’s possible to sense the listening. I can’t give you any more formal scientific explanation than that, but I can tell you from my experience that when I walk on stage in a hall, be it Ted or 10,000 people or 50 people, or I’m talking to an individual, I’m thinking, what’s the listing I’m speaking into? And that makes me sensitive to it and it’ll change. That’s why anybody who’s a public speaker, it’s a very good idea to be there early and to make sure that you’ve understood what the audience has just experienced before you. And they might have a brilliant speaker who made them laugh and cry and so forth, oh wow, I’ve really got to raise my game here.

Or they might’ve had somebody who’s really pissed them off and they might be seething and very upset. So you need to know those things otherwise you’re walking on and you really don’t know what you are walking into. So sensing it, asking that question, what’s the listening I’m speaking into is how you hit the bullseye instead of missing the target altogether with your speaking. I’m talking here about what you choose to say and how you choose to say it as well. Pace, energy, the vocabulary you use and the topics you are going to cover and how you roll them out. All of those things are very different if you are talking to an audience of septuagenarians, as opposed to an audience of kids, or an audience perhaps who don’t speak your language very well and they’re having to translate simultaneously. I’ve seen people in that situation go on stage and rattle off very fast English and the people in the audience are just looking, what is it? I can’t keep up.

Matt Abrahams: Right.

Julian Treasure: So it’s very important to ask that question. What’s the listening I’m speaking into?

Matt Abrahams: I love the perspective change that that question requires. It forces us to really think about what we’re bringing to the audience and how we can help them digest what it is we’re saying. Too often we come in with the approach that it’s all about what I want to say. It’s really what your audience needs to hear. And by asking yourself about the listening you are speaking into, it really has us focus on that. And I appreciate that very much and thank you for sharing.

Julian Treasure: Well, of course it’s never about you, is it? And that’s one of the most important things to understand as a speaker. It’s not about me, it’s about the gift I’m giving to those people. And that’s where the four foundations that I talk about come in and so forth of powerful speaking. So it’s giving them a gift. And the more you are involved in that and what’s happening, it’s getting the ball over the net. Does it get received? Because if not, your wasting your time and theirs.

Matt Abrahams: I love that analogy of a gift because many people have a great fear of speaking in front of others, and a lot of that has to do with our self-focus. And when we remind ourselves that we have value to bring: a gift to give, it can change our own internal assessment of our confidence and anxiety. And I appreciate that.

In addition to listening, you focus a lot on speaking, and in particular, you give guidance on how to nurture and hone our voice. Can you give us a few examples of things that we can do with our voice and activities that we can practice so we can tune our voice to maximally be listened to?

Julian Treasure: Well, a couple of things I would suggest. First of all, breathing. Now in most people’s lives, unless you are a very strong on exercise for breathing, tends to be something we do very little of. We breathe in a very shallow fashion most of the time, and it’s not a conscious pursuit. Now, that’s not the case for everybody. There are people who’ve got breathing practices. There’s yoga which focuses entirely on breathing even, and all yoga uses breathing. But if the people listening to this haven’t a breathing practice, that would be a strong recommendation of mine. If you want to speak powerfully, develop a breathing practice. And that can be as simple as conscious breathing, which is breathing in through the nose, out through the mouth. So in through the nose is silent, out through the mouth as if you’re whistling and count it so that you start to extend the length of time that you can breathe in for and the length of time you breathe out for.

And just take that on as a practice. You don’t have to do it all the time, but just a few times a day. If you spent five minutes, 10 minutes doing this, you start to become more acquainted with your lungs. You become conscious of what’s going on there because your voice is just breath. Also, breath is very important if you ever feel nervous because when you come on stage and your voice is a little bit like that, then a big deep breath is the thing that will settle your voice right down. So it’s a powerful tool as well in stress situations, but it’s also very important to be able to breathe effectively. And that’s without getting into the technicalities of diaphragm control and all that stuff that singers know a great deal about. So that’s the first thing I’d say in terms of improving anybody’s voice is to get to know your breathing.

And then I think the other thing would be to take on some of the tools in the vocal toolbox that I talk about, which may be prosody or prosody, intonation being a big part of that, or it might be volume or it might be pacing and to start to play with them and extend your range. Now that requires perhaps a quiet place to practice where you’re not going to bother other people. I used to do seminar work with groups of people. I’ve had people in those seminars going, I’m shouting that’s as loud as I can go. No, really that’s not true, that’s your perception. But we can all extend our range in terms of how loud we can go and how quiet we can go. It’s just get a book, a novel, whatever it might be, and start to read to yourself and extend your range.Really exaggerate the intonation. So you are really going mad about this kind of thing, which you wouldn’t necessarily do on stage, but it’s like training muscles. And if you do a lot of pullups or pushups or barbell things or whatever it might be, your muscles get stronger and you are more capable to lift something when you need to. And that’s exactly what it’s like. Again, with pace, being able to slow right down when you need to, perhaps that’s the listening that I’m speaking into, but also being able to go faster and faster when you need to. And that is crucial for avoiding monotony as is changing the tone. Monotone, of course, is where the word monotony comes from. Boredom comes from somebody who’s got very little infection or intonation, then just speaks on one tone the whole time. Well, if that’s you work at it. Practicing, extending your range with all these things and being able to stop, those three words: extend your range is my strongest hint to anybody who wants to become a more powerful speaker.

Matt Abrahams: Many, many very practical bits of advice. And thank you. When I look at this kind of work, I remind people that our brains are wired for variety, for change. When things become stagnant, we stop paying attention to them in the same way. And your points all lead us to have variation in variety. One of the things I encourage the students I teach to do is to take children’s poetry or children’s books, which are often meant to be read in a very exaggerated way, to do exactly what you’re talking about, to extend that range and to build what I call vocal stamina, the ability to support your voice for long periods of time in those exercises you reviewed for us are very helpful ways. So thank you. Many of us focus so much on our content. We don’t think about how to use our voice well to deliver that content and the tips you gave can help us to do that. So Julian, before we end, I’d like to ask you the same three questions I ask everyone who joins me. Are you up for that?

Julian Treasure: I am.

Matt Abrahams: If you were to capture the best communication advice you have ever received in a five to seven word presentation slide title, what would it be?

Julian Treasure: Ask what’s the listening?

Matt Abrahams: Yes, yes.

Julian Treasure: Simply that is so crucial, and it’s the thing that’s so many people overlook to do because it all becomes about them. It becomes about the sender, and the receiver is the person that matters always. Whether it’s one person or 10,000, it doesn’t matter. So ask what’s the listing is absolutely the most important thing. I would put that in huge letters across the slide,

Matt Abrahams: Absolutely, and certainly not a surprising answer yet. A very important one. Question number two, and I’ll be very curious to get your answer to this. Who is a communicator that you admire and why?

Julian Treasure: I had the great pleasure of meeting Ken Robinson at a lunch break at Ted in Vancouver some years ago. And his Ted talk is number one for a reason. When you see him live, he’s a master. I’ve seen a lot of great talkers. I was in the room for Brian Stevensons, amazing talk, Brene Brown, Susan Cain. I’ve seen a lots of people who’ve been very, very good, and I’m in awe of the people who don’t need notes and can just rattle things off from memory. But I think Ken, because he combines humor, often very self-effacing humor and storytelling in such a majestic way. I mean, he does it naturally. Ken would be sadly missed now, but a wonderful raconteur brilliant speaker and a wonderful communicator.

Matt Abrahams: Excellent. And that is an amazing talk. Question number three, final question. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

Julian Treasure: Content has to be number one. I asked this question to Chris Anderson actually when I interviewed him for my book, how to Be Heard, and I said to him, which one’s more important, content or delivery? And he said, well, it has to be content because if somebody is delivering earth shattering content in a boring way, I’ll stay with them. But if somebody is delivering absolute nonsense brilliantly, it’s just irritating.

And I think there’s a lot of truth in that. So content has to come first, and there’s a great deal in thinking about what it is that you are going to put across. The biggest question I think with content has got to be, so what newspaper editors beat into their drum, into their trainee journalists, and you have to have the first paragraph should say everything, and it has to say, why would you want to read the rest of this? So why is the reader going to be interested? Why is the listener going to be interested? What’s in it for them? So content first, then delivery. Yes. I mean, thinking about the vocal toolbox, all the amazing tools that we’ve got, I mean, the human voice is an extraordinary thing, and most people take it as a given. This is the voice I’ve been given. No, obviously there are physiological aspects to this.

Some people have got deeper voices, others don’t. We are different shapes, we have different vocal chords, different resonating chambers, but you can do so much with whatever you’ve been given to extend it. And when I hear any great, great, amazing singer, I just think, my goodness, what the human voice can do. And I’ve done quite a bit of training, but I’m not scratching the surface of it. So content first and then delivery. And then the third thing I would say is taken from my four foundations of powerful speaking hail, which is honesty, authenticity, integrity. And it’d be the fourth one of those, which is love. That is to say, wishing people well. And that comes back to giving the gift. So if you’re actually wishing somebody well and giving them a gift of something, they’re much more likely to receive it and appreciate it. Then if you are all about how important you are and standing on your hill above them and bestowing pearls of wisdom down to the swine below, and that’s not going to go down so well. So yes, I think content delivery and love would be my three ingredients.

Matt Abrahams: Powerful, content, delivery and love. So Julian, thank you so much for your time today. It was fantastic to speak with you. You certainly didn’t disappoint. You provided wonderful information, insight, and specific practical and tactical tools that we can use. Thank you for your time. I encourage everybody to listen to your TED Talks and to get your book, how to Be Heard, secrets of Powerful Speaking and listening. Thank you very much.

Julian Treasure: Well, thanks for having me. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Matt Abrahams: Thanks for listening to another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast . To gain more insights and information, please follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. You can also help us spread the word by rating and reviewing our show on Apple or Spotify. You can find transcripts for all of our episodes via the link in the show notes and on the Stanford GSB website. This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Ryan Campos, Podium Podcast, and me, Matt Abrahams.

If you liked our topic today, we have more interviews that dive deeply into listening our episode. Listen, Listen, Listen: How to Build Deep Connections from earlier this spring shares tips on being a skilled conversationalist. And in April of last year, I sat down with one of my co-teachers for an episode. We called , Are You Listening? How to Stay Open and Curious to Other People’s Ideas . In it, Kristen Hansen and I talk about the importance of really hearing where others are coming from. Another you might enjoy is Forgiveness, How the Right Communication Repairs Relationships . This episode features Fred Luskin and we look at research showing how forgiveness affects our psychological, relational, and physical health. Our music was provided by Floyd Wonder. For more episodes, find us on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

For media inquiries, visit the Newsroom .

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April 28, 2022 “Are You Listening?” How to Stay Open and Curious to Other People’s Ideas In this episode, we discuss the importance of really hearing where others are coming from.

May 10, 2022 Forgiveness: How the Right Communication Repairs Relationships In this podcast episode, we look at the role of forgiveness in healthy communication.

May 09, 2023 Listen, Listen, Listen: How to Build Deep Connections Rachel Greenwald shares how to be a skilled conversationalist in work, love, and life.

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6.2 Importance of Listening

Understanding how listening works provides the foundation we need to explore why we listen, including various types and styles of listening. In general, listening helps us achieve communication goals: physical, instrumental, relational, and identity. Listening is also important in academic, professional, and personal contexts.

In terms of academics, poor listening skills were shown to contribute significantly to failure in a person’s first year of college (Zabaya and Wolvin, 215–17). In general, students with high scores for listening ability have greater academic achievement. Interpersonal communication skills including listening are also highly sought after by potential employers, consistently ranking in the top ten in national surveys, according to the 2011 “Job Outlook” published by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Poor listening skills, lack of conciseness, and inability to give constructive feedback have been identified as potential communication challenges in professional contexts. Even though listening education is lacking in our society, research has shown that introductory communication courses provide important skills necessary for functioning in entry-level jobs, including listening, writing, motivating/ persuading, interpersonal skills, informational interviewing, and small-group problem-solving (DiSalvo, 283–90). Training and improvements in listening will continue to pay off as employers desire employees with good communication skills, and employees who have good listening skills are more likely to get promoted.

Listening also has implications for our personal lives and relationships. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of listening to make someone else feel better and to open our perceptual field to new sources of information. Empathetic listening can help us expand our self- and social awareness by learning from other people’s experiences and by helping us take on different perspectives. Emotional support in the form of empathetic listening and validation during times of conflict can help relational partners manage common stressors of relationships that may otherwise lead a partnership to deteriorate (Milardo and Helms-Erikson, 37).

The following list reviews some of the main functions of listening that are relevant in multiple contexts:

• to focus on messages sent by other people or noises coming from our surroundings,
• to better our understanding of other people’s communication,
• to critically evaluate other people’s messages,
• to monitor nonverbal signals,
• to indicate that we are interested or paying attention,
• to empathize with others and show we care for them (relational maintenance), and
• to engage in negotiation, dialogue, or other exchanges that result in shared understanding of or agreement on an issue.

Listening Types

Listening serves many purposes, and different situations require different types of listening. The type of listening we engage in affects our communication and how others respond to us. For example, when we listen to empathize with others, our communication will likely be supportive and open, which will then lead the other person to feel heard and supported and hopefully view the interaction positively (Bodie and Villaume, 48). The main types of listening we will discuss are discriminative, informational, critical, and empathetic (Watson et al., 1–13).

Discriminative Listening

Discriminative listening is a focused and usually instrumental type of listening that is primarily physiological and occurs mostly at the receiving stage of the listening process. Here we engage in listening to scan and monitor our surroundings in order to isolate particular auditory or visual stimuli. For example, we may focus our listening to a sound coming from a dark part of the yard while walking the dog at night to determine if the noise we just heard presents us with any danger. Or we may look for a particular nonverbal cue to let us know our conversational partner received our message (Hargie, 185). In the absence of a hearing impairment, we have an innate and physiological ability to engage in discriminative listening. Although this is the most basic form of listening, it provides the foundation on which more intentional listening skills are built. This type of listening can be refined and honed. Think of how musicians, singers, and mechanics exercise specialized discriminative listening to isolate specific aural stimuli and how actors, detectives, and sculptors discriminate visual cues that allow them to analyze, make meaning from, or re-create nuanced behavior (Wolvin and Coakley, 18–19).

Informational Listening

Informational listening entails listening with the goal of comprehending and retaining information . This type of listening is not evaluative and is common in teaching and learning contexts ranging from a student listening to an informative speech to an out-of-towner listening to directions to the nearest gas station. We also use informational listening when we listen to news reports, voicemail, and briefings at work. Since retention and recall are important components of informational listening, good concentration and memory skills are key. These also happen to be skills that many college students struggle with, at least in the first years of college, but will be expected to have mastered once they get into professional contexts. In many professional contexts, informational listening is important, especially when receiving instructions. I caution my students that they will be expected to process verbal instructions more frequently in their profession than they are in college. Most college professors provide detailed instructions and handouts with assignments so students can review them as needed, but many supervisors and managers will expect you to take the initiative to remember or record vital information. Additionally, many bosses are not as open to questions or requests to repeat themselves as professors are.

Critical listening entails listening with the goal of analyzing or evaluating a message based on information presented verbally and information that can be inferred from context . A critical listener evaluates a message and accepts it, rejects it, or decides to withhold judgment and seek more information. As constant consumers of messages, we need to be able to assess the credibility of speakers and their messages and identify various persuasive appeals and faulty logic (known as fallacies). Critical listening is important during persuasive exchanges, but I recommend always employing some degree of critical listening, because you may find yourself in a persuasive interaction that you thought was informative. People often disguise inferences as facts. Critical listening skills are useful when listening to a persuasive speech in this class and when processing any of the persuasive media messages we receive daily. You can see judges employ critical listening, with varying degrees of competence, on talent competition shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, America’s Got Talent , and The Voice . While the exchanges between judge and contestant on these shows are expected to be subjective and critical, critical listening is also important when listening to speakers who have stated or implied objectivity, such as parents, teachers, political leaders, doctors, and religious leaders. We will learn more about how to improve your critical thinking skills later in this chapter.

Empathetic Listening

Empathetic listening is the most challenging form of listening and occurs when we try to understand or experience what a speaker is thinking or feeling . Empathetic listening is distinct from sympathetic listening. While the word empathy means to “feel into” or “feel with” another person, sympathy means to “feel for” someone. Sympathy is generally more self-oriented and distant than empathy (Bruneau, 188). Empathetic listening is other-oriented and should be genuine. Because of our own centrality in our perceptual world, empathetic listening can be difficult. It’s often much easier for us to tell our own story or to give advice than it is to really listen to and empathize with someone else. We should keep in mind that sometimes, others just need to be heard, and our feedback isn’t actually desired.

Empathetic listening is key for dialogue and helps maintain interpersonal relationships. In order to reach dialogue, people must have a degree of open-mindedness and a commitment to civility that allows them to be empathetic while still allowing them to believe in and advocate for their own position. An excellent example of critical and empathetic listening in action is the international truth and reconciliation movement. The most well-known example of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) occurred in South Africa as a way to address the various conflicts that occurred during apartheid (for more information, visit http://www.justice.gov.za/trc ). The first TRC in the United States occurred in Greensboro, North Carolina, as a means of processing the events and aftermath of November 3, 1979, when members of the Ku Klux Klan shot and killed five members of the Communist Worker’s Party during a daytime confrontation witnessed by news crews and many bystanders. The goal of such commissions is to allow people to tell their stories, share their perspectives in an open environment, and be listened to (for more information, visit http://www.greensborotrc.org/truth_reconciliation.php ).

The truth and reconciliation process seeks to heal relations between opposing sides by uncovering all pertinent facts, distinguishing truth from lies, and allowing for acknowledgment, appropriate public mourning, forgiveness, and healing. The focus often is on giving victims, witnesses, and even perpetrators a chance to publicly tell their stories without fear of prosecution.

Listening Styles

Just as there are different types of listening, there are also different styles of listening. People may be categorized as one or more of the following listeners: people-oriented, action-oriented, content-oriented, and time-oriented listeners. Research finds that 40% of people have more than one preferred listening style and that they choose a style based on the listening situation (Bodie and Villaume, 50). Other research finds that people often still revert back to a single preferred style in times of emotional or cognitive stress, even if they know a different style of listening would be better (Worthington, 82). Following a brief overview of each listening style, we will explore some of their applications, strengths, and weaknesses.

People-oriented listeners are concerned about the needs and feelings of others and may get distracted from a specific task or the content of a message in order to address feelings.

Action-oriented listeners prefer well-organized, precise, and accurate information. They can become frustrated when they perceive communication to be unorganized or inconsistent or a speaker to be long-winded.

Content-oriented listeners are analytic and enjoy processing complex messages. They like in-depth information and like to learn about multiple sides of a topic or hear multiple perspectives on an issue. Their thoroughness can be difficult to manage if there are time constraints.

Time-oriented listeners are concerned with completing tasks and achieving goals. They do not like information perceived as irrelevant and like to stick to a timeline. They may cut people off and make quick decisions (taking shortcuts or cutting corners) when they think they have enough information.

Summary on Listening

Listening is a learned process and skill that we can improve on with concerted effort. Improving our listening skills can benefit us in academic, professional, personal, and civic contexts.

Listening is the process of receiving, interpreting, recalling, evaluating, and responding to verbal and nonverbal messages. In the receiving stage, we select and attend to various stimuli based on salience. We then interpret auditory and visual stimuli in order to make meaning out of them based on our existing schemata. Short-term and long-term memory store stimuli until they are discarded or processed for later recall. We then evaluate the credibility, completeness, and worth of a message before responding with verbal and nonverbal signals.

Discriminative listening is the most basic form of listening, and we use it to distinguish between and focus on specific sounds. We use informational listening to try to comprehend and retain information. Through critical listening, we analyze and evaluate messages at various levels. We use empathetic listening to try to understand or experience what a speaker is feeling.

People-oriented listeners are concerned with others’ needs and feelings, which may distract from a task or the content of a message. Action-oriented listeners prefer listening to well-organized and precise information and are more concerned about solving an issue than they are about supporting the speaker. Content-oriented listeners enjoy processing complicated information and are typically viewed as credible because they view an issue from multiple perspectives before making a decision. Although content-oriented listeners may not be very effective in situations with time constraints, time-oriented listeners are fixated on time limits and listen in limited segments regardless of the complexity of the information or the emotions involved, which can make them appear cold and distant to some.

Fundamentals of Communication Copyright © 2022 by LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The Art of Listening: Communication Skill Essay

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Introduction

Communication is a complex process that involves encoding and decoding of information. Listening, which is one of the communication elements, determines how effective the communication process is. Most people do not know how they can improve their listening skills in order to perfect communication. The process of improving listening requires one to develop a specific point of view to use in evaluating a message’s content.

Among all communication skills, the art of listening is less emphasized. In most cases when dealing with communication skills problems, most people overlook listening (McKelvie, 2009). It is however important for communicators to understand that listening promotes good communication. As a good listener, one is required to differentiate the speaker’s emotional and delivery elements from the substance and content of the message (McKelvie, 2009). Most people are unable to overcome the distraction associated with the speaker’s emotional elements and thus end up receiving the wrong information.

To avoid being distracted by delivery and emotional elements which tend to cover the message’s content, it is important for a listener to learn how to differentiate facts and ideas. Generally, a listener should understand that listening entails more than message delivery. When listening, a listener should be keen to identify the core information. To avoid emotional element distraction, it’s important for a listener to bear in mind that emotional and delivery elements are not included in the message as elements for emphasizing the substance of the message, but rather as elements to help one in identifying the main substance of the message.

According to McKelvie, (2009), a listener should try to identify the content of the message rather than dwelling on how the message is delivered. To avoid distraction by the delivery and emotional elements a listener should develop a habit of developing responses about the issues being discussed from the speaker’s messages. In addition, to be more focused on the message’s content and substance rather than its emotional elements, a listener should always try to find the answers for any questions arising from the speech.

Another way through which a listener can learn how to improve communication is by trying to analyze the message or speech’s content from someone else’s point of view (McKelvie, 2009). Analysing the message using a different person’s point of view increases the listener’s horizon which enables him to have a better understanding of the specific topic. In order to avoid distractions when listening and improve on identifying the message content, a listener should learn when and how to focus on facts. Listeners should always bear in mind that facts are generated from ideas (McKelvie, 2009). Since the process of identifying facts is a complex one, listeners need to learn how to give the speaker undivided attention. Making notes while listening can help a listener improve his listening skills (McKelvie, 2009).

As a way of lowering distraction by the emotional and delivery elements of the message and focus more on the content of the message, a listener should learn how to relate the message delivery system with message content. A good listener should be in a position to differentiate ideas and employ this skill in analyzing the message’s content. A listener should be in a position to identify some of the emotional and delivery elements such as biased perspective and environmental factors that are most likely to cause him to have a distracted attention while listening. One strategy through which a listener can avoid message distractions is by learning to focus mainly on facts rather than ideas (McKelvie, 2009).

McKelvie, R., (2009). Listen Better to improve relationships . Suite101 publishers.

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What Great Listeners Actually Do

by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman

Summary .   

What makes a good listener? Most people think is comes down to three components: not interrupting the speaker, following along with facial expressions, and being able to repeat back almost verbatim what the speaker has just said. According to research from Zenger and Folkman, however, we’re doing it all wrong. Instead of thinking of a good listener as a sponge —absorbing everything but providing little feedback — a skilled listener should be thought of as a trampoline who amplifies and supports a speaker’s thoughts by providing constructive feedback. Engaging in a two-way conversation is essential, according to data, and Zenger and Folkman define six levels of listening, all meant to help listeners develop this skill.

Chances are you think you’re a good listener.  People’s appraisal of their listening ability is much like their assessment of their driving skills , in that the great bulk of adults think they’re above average.

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The Importance of Listening and The Effective Listening Techniques

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