Active Listening Skills

This handout http://www.taft.cc.ca.us/lrc/class/assignments/actlisten.html

... describes:

Attending
A: Eye contact
B: Posture
C: Gesture

S.O.L.E.R.
Five steps to attentive listening
Squarely face the person
Open your posture
Lean towards the sender
Eye contact maintained
Relax while attending


Paraphrasing
Clarifying
Perception Checking
Summarizing
Primary Empathy
Advanced Empathy

 
Here is an outline the listening process and styles of listening:

• Hearing is the physiological process of perceiving sound; listening is the process of recognizing, understanding, and interpreting the message.
• We improve listening skills by focusing on the voluntary parts of the process: selecting, choosing one sound over others; attending, focusing on the message or sound; understanding, making sense of the message; remembering, recalling information; and responding, giving feedback.
• Active listening involves making choices about selecting, attending, and so on, and is more competent than passive listening. Listening fidelity is the degree to which the thoughts of the listener agree with the intentions of the source of the message following their communication.
• People-oriented listeners listen with relationships in mind.
• Action-oriented listeners focus on tasks.
• Content-oriented listeners carefully evaluate what they hear.
• Time-oriented listeners prefer information that is clear and to the point.
• Most people develop multiple listening preferences.

List the reasons why we listen:

• Informational listening is used to understand a message.
• In critical listening, you evaluate or analyze information, evidence, ideas, or opinions, and use critical thinking.
• Empathic listening is an attempt to know how another person feels, often using paraphrasing to recognize and elaborate on the other’s feelings.
• Appreciative listening is used when the goal is simply to appreciate the sounds, such as music.

Identify challenges to good listening:

• Listening barriers are factors that interfere with our ability to comprehend information and respond appropriately.
• Allergies and crying babies are examples of environmental factors that impair our ability to listen .
• Hearing loss challenges can be overcome with understanding of nonverbal behaviors. Processing challenges (for example, ADD) are faced by many who have normal hearing.
• Multitasking, attending to several things at once, limits focus on any one task.
• A boring speaker or topic can be hard to follow, and on the flip side, overexcitement can be distracting.
• Talking may be regarded as more powerful than listening.
• Overconfidence may cause us not to pay careful attention during communication.
• Listening apprehension, anxiety or dread associated with listening, may hinder concentration.

Identify attitudinal and ethical factors that inhibit listening:

• Defensive listening is responding with aggression and arguing with the speaker, without fully listening to the message.
• Selective listening is zeroing in on bits of information that interest you, disregarding other messages or parts of messages.
• Selfish listeners listen for their own needs and may practice monopolistic listening, or listening in order to control the communication interaction.
• Insensitive listening occurs when we fail to pay attention to the emotional content of someone’s message and just take it at face value.
• Pseudolistening is pretending to listen while not really paying attention.

Describe how various contexts affect listening:

• Different situations (a crowded party, a professional conference) create different challenges.
• The dynamics of the relationship between communicators can also change how you listen .
• As in all aspects of communication, the cultural context affects listening behavior.
• It may seem that we don’t listen when we communicate electronically, but technology is an important context for listening.

SOURCE: Real Communication. O'Hair and Weimann