Ways to understand others

listening skills

According to chapter 3 , 4 and 5  in people skills, we spend most of our waking hours listening. Compared to the fact that writing took 9 percent and reading took 16 minutes, listening absorbed 70 percent.  So it is obvious that we need to improve our listening skills not reading and writing skills. But ironically, we are apt to put our effort on improving reading or writing skills. Even in school, most of teachers teach how to read or write well , which makes students poor listeners.

Listening can be classified into hearing and listening. When it comes to hearing, it is the physiological sensory processes. On the other hand listening  is a more complex psychological procedure involving interpreting and understanding. Speaking of listening there are three necessary skills which are attending skills, following skills and reflecting skills.    

The cluster of listening skills

Firstly, attending is giving your physical attention to another person. In attending skills there are three specific skills such as a posture of involvement, appropriate body motion ,eye contact and non distracting environment.  Because body language often speaks louder than words, It is important to give the impression to other person that you are engaged in the conversation. For example, if you face the other squarely and maintain an open position with arms and legs uncrossed,  the other person will consider you are attentive listener.

Secondly, following skills such as door openers, minimal encourage, open questions and attentive silence can foster effective listening. Door openers is sign or invitation that people send to their friends or spouse. But most people send door closers even if it is necessary to send door openers. And when it comes to questions during communication, there are open questions and closed questions. When people ask closed questions which can be answered with yes or no, these questions can be the barriers of the communication. In contrast to the closed questions, open questions can provide the space for the speaker to think , which can initiate interaction.  

Thirdly, regarding reflecting skills there is paraphrasing, reflecting feelings, reflecting meanings, and summative reflections. Paraphrase is a correct reponse in which the speaker changes words into their own word so that the listener can understand their word easily.  If the speaker paraphrase words effectively, it can help listener focus on the content of the message. Also it is crucial to reflect feelings of the speakers while we have conversation. If we reflect feelings well, we can catch the speaker’s personal reaction such as joy, sorrow, and anger to the certain events. By improving this skill, we can improve the skills which can read the emotions of others. We can train this skill when we listen for feeling words, inferring feelings from the overall content and observing body language. Although the reflection of feeling is the essence of effective listening ,in these days the majority of listeners tend to focus more on the contents than feelings. Thus it is vital for us to foster this reflecting skills in order to participate into conversation and understand speaker properly. Lastly summative reflection is literally summary of the conversation, which can enable the other to speak more profoundly and the speaker to understand his situation clearly. can help tie the loose strands of a conversation

To sum up, since it is indisputable that listening is crucial activity in our waking hours, we need to foster our listening skills based on the three listening skills above. Since it is competitive society in these days, many people are inclined to insist their opinion interrupting others’ word . Furthermore numerous people feel awkward  when they use this skills and they reckon this is too structured. But if they follow six peculiarities of human communication which were mentioned in chapter 5 :, 1. words have different meanings for different people, 2. People often code their messages 3. People frequently talk about presenting problem when another topic is of greater concern to them 4. The speaker may be blind to her emotions or blinded by them. 5. Listeners are often easily distracted 6. Listeners hear through filters that distort much of what is being said ,  this reflective listening can let us have communication with other people more accurately and profoundly. And this will lead us to relate to other people more while we have conversation with others. Thus in order to become good listener, we should respond reflectively to what the speaker says.